Shelly Lundberg, distinguished professor of economics and the Leonard Broom Professor of Demography at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has received the 2026 Jacob Mincer Award from the Society of Labor Economics. The award recognizes Dr. Lundberg’s lifetime contributions to the study of labor economics.
In her research on labor economics and the economics of the family, Dr. Lundberg conducts theoretical modeling of discrimination and inequality as well as family decision-making. She also uses empirical analysis to study marriage and fertility, labor supply, wage determination, and intra-household allocations. More recently, Dr. Lundberg has studied the sources of educational inequality and gender gaps in education. She is the author of the recently published How Economics Discovered Women: Bringing Gender Economics into the 21st Century (University of California Press, 2026).
Dr. Lundberg is an honors graduate of the University of British Columbia in Canada. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where her research centered on unemployment and household labor supply. Before joining the UC Santa Barbara faculty, she taught at the University of Washington and the University of Pennsylvania.