Harry J. Holzer

Harry J. Holzer is a professor of public policy at Georgetown University and an Institute Fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington DC. He is a former chief economist for the U.S. Department of Labor and a former professor of economics at Michigan State University. He received his A.B. from Harvard in 1978 and his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard in 1983. He is a senior affiliate of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan and a research affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also a nonresident senior fellow with the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program and a member of the editorial board at the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

Holzer's research has focused primarily on the labor market problems of low-wage workers and other disadvantaged groups. His books include The Black Youth Employment Crisis (coedited with Richard Freeman, University of Chicago Press, 1986); What Employers Want: Job Prospects for Less-Educated Workers (Russell Sage Foundation, 1996); Employers and Welfare Recipients: The Effects of Welfare Reform in the Workplace (with Michael Stoll, Public Policy Institute of California, 2001); Moving Up or Moving On: Who Advances in the Low-Wage Labor Market (with Fredrik Andersson and Julia Lane), Russell Sage Foundation, 2005; Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men (with Peter Edelman and Paul Offner), Urban Institute Press, 2006; and Reshaping the American Workforce in a Changing Economy (coedited with Demetra Nightingale), Urban Institute Press, 2007.