Lane has triple citizenship in the United States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. She earned a bachelor's degree from Massey University in New Zealand in 1977, studying economics and the Japanese language, and then came to the University of Missouri for graduate study. She completed a master's degree in statistics with a minor in mathematics, and a Ph.D. in economics with a minor in German, both in 1982.[1]
She joined the faculty of Western Illinois University in 1982, and moved to the University of Louisville in 1983. She moved again to American University in 1990, taking a temporary drop in rank to assistant professor in the move; while at American University, beginning in 1992, she also began consulting with the Education and Social Policy and Private Sector Development units of the World Bank. In 2000 she took a position as Director and Principal Research Associate at the Urban Institute and in 2004 she became a Program Director for Economics at the National Science Foundation. From 2005 to 2008 she was Senior Vice President at NORC at the University of Chicago, and from 2008 to 2012 she returned to the National Science Foundation as a Senior Program Director. From 2012 to 2015 she worked at the American Institutes for Research, and since 2015 she has been affiliated with New York University. There, she is Professor of Public Service in the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, Professor of the Practice in the Center for Urban Science and Progress, and Provostial Fellow for Innovation Analytics.[1]
She has received over $50 million in grants, from many foundations such as National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and from different governments.
She won the ASA's Julius Shiskin Memorial Award for Economic Statistics in 2014. In the same year, she won the Roger Herriot award. "for her contributions to the development of a new Census Bureau program that has significantly advanced research on employment dynamics",[2] and in the same year also won the ASA's Roger Herriot Award for the same census project.[3]
Where Are All The Good Jobs Going? What National And Local Job Quality And Dynamics Mean For U.S. Workers (with Harry J. Holzer and David Rosenblum, Russell Sage Press, 2011)[6]
^Reviews for Economic Turbulence: Is A Volatile Economy Good for America?:
Terry J. Fitzgerald (2007), The Region, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, [1];
Edward M. Gramlich (2007), International Review of Economics & Finance 16 (4): 605–606, doi:10.1016/j.iref.2006.10.003;
Mitch Renkow (August 2008), Journal of Regional Science 48 (3): 673–675, doi:10.1111/j.1467-9787.2008.00567_10.x.
Listed as an Outstanding Academic Title in the Social and Behavioral Sciences for 2007 by the American Library Association, [2].
^Reviews of Where Are All The Good Jobs Going? What National And Local Job Quality And Dynamics Mean For U.S. Workers:
Stephen E. Baldwin (October 2011), "Matching good people and good jobs", Monthly Labor Review, JSTORmonthlylaborrev.2011.10.031;
Susan Houseman (March 2012), Journal of Economic Literature 50 (1): 198–200, JSTOR23269984;
Arne L. Kalleberg (December 2012), Contemporary Sociology 42 (1): 86–88, doi:10.1177/0094306112468721o;
Arindrajit Dube (July 2013), ILR Review 66 (4): 1015–1017, doi:10.1177/001979391306600413, JSTOR24369564.