The W.E. Upjohn Institute is pleased to announce two new senior staff appointments.
Susan N. Houseman has been named Vice President and Director of Research.
A recognized expert on temporary help employment, outsourcing, and nonstandard work arrangements, Houseman’s research has examined trends in employers’ use of these arrangements and their implications for workers’ wages, benefits, and employment stability. Her research on outsourcing and offshoring has highlighted measurement problems in U.S. statistics and her work on short-time compensation in state unemployment insurance programs has examined work sharing as a tool to mitigate unemployment during recessions. Other research focuses on older workers and retirement issues and comparative labor market policies in Japan and Europe.
Houseman also chairs the Technical Advisory Committee to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; is a Program Director and Research Fellow at IZA (Institute for the Study of Labor) in Bonn, Germany; is a member of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, NBER; and serves on committees for the American Economic Association and the Labor and Employment Research Association.
Brad Hershbein has added Director of Information and Communications Services to his duties as an Economist with the Institute.
Hershbein's interests focus on labor economics, economics of the family and demography, and economics of education. Recently, he has worked on issues of higher education access, releasing papers that examine how and why the debt of college graduates has been rising over the last two decades, evaluating the effects of a universal and generous college scholarship on college-going and completion, and proposing new ways to provide accurate information on college costs to high school students. Hershbein is also the creator of the New Hires Quality Index.
Hershbein's new duties involve providing leadership to the Institute's communications and publications efforts.