[12] Katz is married to a Harvard colleague, 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics winner Claudia Goldin, and has also worked with her.

[13][14] They wrote the book The Race Between Education and Technology in 2008, which argued that the United States became the world's richest nation thanks to its schools.

[15] It was praised as "a monumental achievement that supplies a unified framework for interpreting how the demand and supply of human capital have shaped the distribution of earnings in the U.S. labor market over the twentieth century",[16] and Alan Krueger of Princeton University said that it "represent[ed] the best of what economics has to offer".

[18] He also serves as the Principal Investigator for the long-term evaluation of the "Moving to Opportunity", a randomized housing mobility experiment.

Katz serves on the Panel of Economic Advisers of the Congressional Budget Office as well as on the Boards of the Russell Sage Foundation and MDRC.