James Feigenbaum

Assistant Professor, Economics, CAS

James Feigenbaum is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Boston University. His primary research interests are at the intersection of economic history and labor economics. Making use of recently digitized and transcribed historical census sources, James has studied intergenerational mobility, inequality, the returns to education, and the long-run effects of early twentieth-century public policy and environmental shocks. To construct these new longitudinal data sources, following individuals over many decades in the early 1900s, James developed new machine learning approaches to historical record linkage with a focus on the specific challenges of working with imperfect and noisy historical data. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 2016 and joined BU after a one-year postdoc at Princeton University.