Audrey Light

Audrey Light is a Professor of Economics at Ohio State University, where she has been employed since 1993. Prior to this, she held positions at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a visiting appointment at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

• Education:
  • Ph.D. (Economics), University of California, Los Angeles (1987)
  • M.A. (Economics), University of California, Los Angeles (1984)
  • B.A. (Economics), University of Chicago (1982)

Her research spans Labor Economics, Economics of Education, and Economic Demography. Current work focuses on college transfers, labor market payoffs to college credit distributions (including STEM-intensity and occupational specificity), and determinants of wealth. Earlier research explored grit in learning, business ownership vs. self-employment, employer learning, marital/cohabiting unions, risk preference and divorce, degree effects in returns to schooling, measurement error, school enrollment patterns, and job mobility.

Awarded the H. Gregg Lewis Prize by the Society of Labor Economists, Light's research has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Spencer Foundation, American Educational Research Association, Kauffman Foundation, and Bureau of Labor Statistics.

She has taught graduate labor economics courses, applied econometrics at the graduate level, and undergraduate courses in microeconomics principles and intermediate microeconomics. From 1993 to 2015, she was a member of the National Longitudinal Surveys contract team, serving as Principal Investigator for the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (2005-2015).