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Richard B. Freeman holds the Herbert Ascherman Chair in Economics at Harvard University. He is currently serving as Faculty Co-Director of the Labor and Worklife Program at the Harvard Law School. Professor Freeman is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He does most of his research at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Freeman's research interests the role of contracts and labor law to protect informal workers and improve labor standards along the supply chain; the job market for scientists and engineers; the transformation of scientific ideas into innovations, Chinese and Korean labor markets; the effects of AI and robots on the job market; and forms of labor market representation and employee ownership.  He coedited  Emerging Labor Market Institutions for the 21st Century, with Joni Hersch and Lawrence Mishel and wrote Can International Labor Standards Improve under Globalization? (with Kimberly Elliot).

He received the Mincer Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Society of Labor Economics in 2006. In 2007 he was awarded the IZA Prize in Labor Economics. In 2016, he was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association.

Emilie Jackson is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Michigan State University. Her research is in the fields of public and labor economics and her recent work uses U.S. tax data to explore the implications of the recent growth in gig employment opportunities (e.g. Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, etc.) for individuals facing unemployment shocks. She quantifies the take-up of gig work during unemployment and evaluates the ability to smooth income in the short run. Furthermore, she evaluates the long-run implications for workers’ labor supply, skill acquisition, and earnings trajectories.

Max Risch is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Tepper School of Business. His research addresses topics in public finance and labor economics. He uses novel administrative datasets to analyze the relationship between public policies and the distribution of income. One strand of his research investigates how firm-worker relationships mediate responses to tax policy and how public policies in turn influence the form of firm-worker relationships. See his 2019 paper Independent Contractors in the U.S.: New Trends from 15 years of Administrative Tax Data, co-authored with Katherine Lim, Alicia Miller, and  Eleanor Wilking. Another strand of his research analyzes the role of tax evasion and tax enforcement for real and measured income inequality.  He received his Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Michigan.