Daniel S. Hamermesh is Professor in Economics, Royal Holloway University of London and Sue Killam Professor Emeritus in the Foundation of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. His A.B. is from the University of Chicago (1965), his Ph.D. from Yale (1969). He taught from 1969-73 at Princeton, from 1973-93 at Michigan State, and at Texas since then. He has held visiting professorships at universities in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia, and lectured at nearly 250 universities in 48 states and 33 foreign countries. His research, published in nearly 100 refereed papers in scholarly journals, has concentrated on time use, labor demand, discrimination, academic labor markets and unusual applications of labor economics (to beauty, sleep and suicide).
Hamermesh is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the Society of Labor Economists, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and Past President of the Society of Labor Economists and of the Midwest Economics Association. In 2013 he received the biennial Mincer Award for Lifetime Contributions to Labor Economics of the Society of Labor Economists; the annual IZA Prize in Labor of the Institute for the Study of Labor; and the biennial John R. Commons Award of the international economics honor society OΔE. His magnum opus, Labor Demand, was published by Princeton University Press in 1993. The same press published his Beauty Pays in 2011. In 2014 Worth Publishers published the fifth edition of his Economics Is Everywhere, a series of 400 vignettes designed to illustrate the ubiquity of economics in everyday life and how the simple tools in a microeconomics principles class can be used. Current vignettes are included on the Freakonomics blog. His undergraduate teaching, particularly of large classes in introductory economics, has gained him several University-wide teaching awards.