08-25-2026
Lance Lochner brings to the Daniels School a research agenda focused on some of the most consequential questions facing individuals, organizations and policymakers: How do people develop skills? What determines who has access to educational opportunities? How do investments in education affect economic mobility? And how should public policy respond when those investments involve significant risk?
Lochner recently joined Purdue as part of the university’s Moveable Dream Hires program. The talent-based program is designed to attract high-performing, top-caliber faculty to Purdue even when the topic-based openings each year do not match the moveable talent.
The professor of economics and faculty affiliate of the Purdue University Research Center in Economics has devoted much of his career to understanding human capital formation across the life cycle.
Lochner serves as co-coordinator of the Markets Network of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group and maintains research affiliations with the National Bureau of Economic Research in the U.S., the Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis in Italy and CESifo in Germany. He is a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists and of the International Association for Applied Econometrics. He recently served as an editor at the Journal of Political Economy. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1998.
Lochner’s current research examines intergenerational mobility, child development, post-secondary financing and the evolution of skills and skill prices. Together, these areas of research reflect a central idea in Lochner’s work: Economic outcomes are shaped by decisions and investments that accumulate over time — and often begin much earlier than we might expect.
A major focus of Lochner’s research is how people acquire and develop skills throughout their lives.
His work has examined skill development not only through formal education but also through experiences in the labor market. Workers continue to acquire skills after entering the workforce, and their decisions about training and skill development can change as the economic value of different skills changes.
Those individual decisions can have broader consequences. As workers acquire skills and respond to changes in their value, their choices can also influence the supply of skills available in the economy. Lochner’s research considers both sides of the process: how people’s skills affect their economic opportunities and how changing economic conditions influence people’s decisions to invest in those skills.
More recently, his research has moved further upstream to early childhood and the origins of differences in educational and economic outcomes. “The longer I've been working on these issues, the more I realize a lot of the problems start earlier and earlier,” Lochner says.
His current research on intergenerational mobility examines how family investments and child development can shape opportunities later in life. In other words, understanding why someone does or does not attend college may require looking well beyond the college years and considering the circumstances that shaped that individual much earlier.
Another important component of Lochner’s research is the economics of higher education and student loans.
While a college degree can provide substantial economic value on average, individual outcomes can vary significantly. Students and families making decisions about college face uncertainty about future earnings, making education an investment with potentially high returns but also considerable risk.
Lochner’s research asks how policy can help families manage that risk efficiently.
A particular focus is the design of student loan repayment systems. How much should borrowers’ payments be reduced when their earnings are low? How can policymakers provide insurance to borrowers who experience poor economic outcomes without weakening incentives to pursue education or seek higher-paying employment? And how can loan programs encourage people to invest in education when they might otherwise be discouraged by the possibility of taking on substantial debt?
“There’s a lot of risk,” Lochner says of the labor market. “How do you help insure against it?”
For Lochner, these are fundamentally questions of policy design, determining when intervention is warranted and how programs can be structured to address economic problems without creating unintended consequences.
Lochner’s research also has a long-standing connection to questions of crime and education. Earlier in his career, he examined whether education could reduce criminal behavior, not simply because individuals who complete more education might differ from those who do not, but because education itself could causally affect decisions about participating in crime.
His research found that completing high school can have a causal effect on reducing criminal behavior, providing evidence that investments in human capital can generate benefits extending well beyond employment and earnings.
That broader perspective continues to characterize his work. Whether he is examining student loans, childhood development, skill acquisition or educational attainment, Lochner focuses on how individual decisions interact with markets and public policy.
At Purdue, that research agenda will also inform his teaching. This year, Lochner is teaching undergraduate and PhD courses in labor economics, bringing his expertise directly into the classroom. He particularly enjoys using current issues and discussion to challenge students to think about familiar economic questions in new ways.
As the Daniels School continues to expand its research strengths, Lochner adds significant expertise in human capital and labor economics — and a research program that connects economic theory and empirical evidence with questions that matter to individuals, businesses and policymakers. His work offers a valuable lens for understanding how investments in people shape economic opportunities today and across generations.
