John Bound
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BIO
Professor Bound is an empirically oriented labor economist. Much of Bound’s research has focused on the effect of health on the labor force behavior of older working-aged men and women with a focus on the effects of the U.S. Social Security Disability Program on the behavior and economic well-being of working aged individuals. He has worked on the reliability and validity of survey measures of health and was an early contributor to the research showing disability declines among the elderly.
In other work, Bound contributed to the evidence that an important influence on the demand for skilled labor within the U.S. is technological change. Much of his recent work has focused on higher education in the U.S. and on the impact of high skilled immigration into the U.S. on U.S. competitiveness and on educational and labor force outcomes for U.S. natives.
In addition, in collaboration with Arline Geronimus, he has written a significant number of papers on black-white differences in health outcomes. Along with his substantive work, Bound has made a number of methodological contributions, including influential work on weak instruments and on measurement error in survey data. He is an elected fellow of the Econometric Society and the Society for Labor Economists and in 2025 received the Jacob Mincer Award from the Society of Labor Economists to recognize his lifetime achievements in the field of labor economics
Along with his affiliation with the Population Studies Center, he is an emeritus professor in the Department of Economics and is a Faculty Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), affiliated with the Labor Studies, and Education and Aging programs.
- Arline T Geronimus, Waidmann, Timothy A, John Bound, Pancini, Vincent, Meifeng Yang. 2025. Long-term Economic Distress and Growing Educational Inequity in Life Expectancy. Epidemiology 36(3):287-296.
- Arline T Geronimus, John Bound, Landon Hughes. 2023. Trend Toward Older Maternal Age Contributed To Growing Racial Inequity In Very-Low-Birthweight Infants In The US. Health Affairs 42(5):674-682.
- Arline T Geronimus, John Bound, Colter Mitchell, Aresha Martinez-Cardoso, Linnea Evans, Landon Hughes, Lisa Schneper, Daniel A. Notterman. 2021. Coming up short: Comparing venous blood, dried blood spots & saliva samples for measuring telomere length in health equity research. PLOS ONE 16(8):e0255237.
- Geronimus, Arline T, Bound, John, Waidmann, Timothy A, Rodriguez, Javier M, Timpe, Brenden . 2019. Weathering, Drugs, and Whack-a-Mole: Fundamental and Proximate Causes of Widening Educational Inequity in U.S. Life Expectancy by Sex and Race, 1990-2015. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 60(2):222-239.
- Bound, John, Khanna, Gaurav , Morales, Nicolas . 2018. Impact of the H-1B Program on the United States. High-Skilled Migration to the United States and Its Economic Consequences
- Bound, John, Khanna, Gaurav , Morales, Nicolas . 2017. Reservoir of foreign talent. Science 356(6339):697.
- John Bound, Arline T Geronimus, Rodriguez, Javier M, Waidmann, Timothy A. 2016. US Life Expectancy: The Authors Reply. Health Affairs 35(3):550-550.
- Geronimus, Arline T, Bound, John, Ro, A Eun Young, Griffith, Derek , Gee, Gilbert . 2016. Educational gradients in five Asian immigrant populations: Do country of origin, duration and generational status moderate the education-health relationship?. Preventive Medicine Reports 4:338-343. PMCID: PMC4963251.
- Bound, John, Demirci, Murat , Khanna, Gaurav , Turner, Sarah E. 2015. Finishing degrees and finding jobs: US higher education and the flow of foreign it workers. Innovation Policy and the Economy 15(1):27-72.
- Bound, John, Braga, Breno , Golden, Joseph , Khanna, Gaurav . 2015. Recruitment of Foreigners in the Market for Computer Scientists in the United States. Journal of Labor Economics 33(S1):S187-S223. PMCID: PMC4860810.