Ashenfelter, the Joseph Douglas Green 1895 Professor of Economics at Princeton University, first started teaching at the university as a Ph.D. student in 1968. He earned his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1970. A leading figure within Princeton’s famed Industrial Relations Section, he served as the group’s director from 1999-2005.

Within the field of economics, Ashenfelter is widely celebrated for helping launch the “credibility revolution”—a movement that encourages the use of experiments and other methods often used in the hard sciences to improve the robustness of social science research. Ashenfelter’s work in that area dates back to his 1974 paper on evaluating training programs with randomized trials and has inspired the work of countless other economists, including two of Ashenfelter’s students who went on to win the Nobel Prize.