Henry “Hank” S. Farber, the Hughes-Rogers Professor of Economics, transferred to emeritus status on September 1, 2023, after more than thirty years on the faculty at Princeton University. Hank has played a pivotal role in shaping the Industrial Relations Section in the Department of Economics through his seminal work in the field of labor economics, as well as his advising and mentorship that have inspired generations of students. Hank has pioneered a range of important research topics including the behavior of unions, arbitration systems, wage-setting, worker mobility, labor supply, unemployment, and the analysis of voter behavior.

Hank grew up in Linden, New Jersey. His interest in unions and the labor market stemmed from his first work experiences: he learned to drive a forklift while in his teens, and he was a card-carrying member of the Teamsters Union. In 1972, he received his Bachelor of Science in economics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, after which he pursued a Master of Science at Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations School. He went on to receive his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 1977. Hank’s first academic position was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he served as professor of economics from 1986 to 1991 before returning to Princeton’s Industrial Relations Section as a professor of economics. He was endowed with the Hughes-Rogers professorship in 1995. Hank has been at the helm of the Industrial Relations Section as director on numerous occasions spanning the 1990s to the 2010s.

Hank’s first major papers studied union bargaining behavior. In his 1978 Journal of Political Economy paper, Hank provided an influential framework for studying union wage determination, in which union decisions were framed as arising from a median voter model. This idea had substantial traction in the literature and became a benchmark model for studying wage determination in a union setting. His 1978 American Economic Review paper offered a new quantitative approach for analyzing strikes, a topic that at that point had not been studied with such a degree of rigor. These papers forever changed the way union decision-making would be studied by economists. Hank continues to write papers on unionization to this day, including an influential paper on unions and income inequality published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2021. He has made regular and serious contributions on the topic for a remarkable forty years.

Hank’s scholarship has drawn on an unusually broad span of methodological approaches. He has written highly cited applied theory papers, technical papers with structural modeling, studies that use state-of-the-art econometric tools, and descriptive papers whose hallmark is the exceptional care with which he analyzes the data. What links many of these papers is the seriousness with which Hank considers the economics of a problem. His most cited paper, and truly one of the most important modern papers written in labor economics, is “Learning and Wage Dynamics” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1996), published with Robert Gibbons. In this paper, Hank combines all of these approaches — theory, description, and econometrics — to link models of learning about worker abilities to the estimation of wage dynamics. This paper remains a mainstay on labor economics syllabi nearly thirty years later.

More recently, Hank has contributed novel insights about how workers determine their own labor supply. Hank’s work in this area centers on detailed data on trips taken by taxi drivers in New York City. Because taxi drivers control the length of their workday, it is a useful setting for examining worker preferences free of the work hour constraints seen in other occupations. Hank’s paper “Why You Can’t Find a Taxi in the Rain and Other Labor Supply Lessons from Cab Drivers” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2015) elevates this literature with rich data and econometric and theoretical sophistication.

The impact of Hank’s research extends well beyond economics. His work has been influential in psychology, sociology, legal studies, and political science and led to the Ghiselli Award for Research Design from the American Psychological Association in 1984 (with Max H. Bazerman). His collaborations reflect his broad reach. His pioneering work on arbitration systems includes a series of important papers with industrial relations specialist Harry Katz and social psychologist Bazerman. He has worked with sociologist Bruce Western documenting the decline of private-sector unionization. His influential work in law and economics includes papers with legal scholars Theodore Eisenberg and Michelle White.

Hank’s great scholarly achievements have brought him numerous prestigious honors and appointments. In 1991 he was named an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow. In 2000 and 2012 he was awarded the economics department’s Richard E. Quandt Teaching Prize. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society, the Society of Labor Economists, and the Labor and Employment Relations Association. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). He was a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 1983 to 1984 and from 1989 to 1990, a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation from 2002 to 2003, and a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study from 2006 to 2007. Hank is also a member of the Executive and Supervisory Committee of Charles University’s Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education (Prague, Czech Republic), as well as a member of Statistics Canada’s Labour and Income Statistics Advisory Committee. He has also served as a member of the editorial board of the American Economics Review and of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and as a co-editor of the Industrial and Labor Relations Review.

Colleagues within and outside the economics department know Hank not only as a renowned scholar but also as an advisor and supporter of many graduate students; as a dedicated teacher of principles of economics and econometrics; as a motor and motorcycle enthusiast; as a faculty fellow for and supporter of the women’s ice hockey team and a hockey player himself; as a committed University citizen. They look forward to his continued role as an integral part of the intellectual life of the Industrial Relations Section, the Department of Economics, and the broader University community.

Written by members of the Department of Economics faculty.