Search

Paul Osterman is the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Professor of Human Resources and Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management as well as a member of the Department of Urban Planning at MIT.  From July 2003 to June 2007, he also served as Deputy Dean at the MIT Sloan School. His research concerns change in work organization within companies, career patterns and processes within firms, economic development, urban poverty, and public policy surrounding skills training and employment programs. Osterman recently executed a nationally representative survey of all employed adults that carefully measured the extent and consequences of non-standard work including contracting out.   That survey was fielded just prior to the COVID crisis and he is currently launching a longitudinal follow up survey. Osterman has been a senior administrator of job training programs for Massachusetts and has consulted widely for government agencies, foundations, community groups, firms, and public interest organizations.

Katharine G. Abraham is Professor of Economics and Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland. Her published research includes papers on outsourcing and alternative work arrangements; the work and retirement decisions of older Americans; student financial aid and college attendance; cyclical fluctuations in the labor market; and the measurement of economic activity.  She served as Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1993 through 2001 and as a Member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2011 through 2013. 

Abraham was a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on Contingent Work and Alternative Work Arrangements.  The Committee (which included Susan Houseman, Chair, and David Weil), published its report, Measuring Alternative Work Arrangements for Research and Policy, in 2020.  She currently serves on standing academic advisory committees convened by the Congressional Budget Office, Bureau of Economic Analysis, and Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.  She is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. 

Eileen Appelbaum is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, DC, and Fellow at Rutgers University Center for Women and Work. Prior to joining CEPR, she held positions as Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University and as Professor of Economics at Temple University. She is past president of the Labor and Employment Relations Association and served on the Board of the Industry Studies Association. Her current research focuses on the financialization of hospitals and health systems and she has published widely on this topic.

Dr. Appelbaum has a long-standing interest in domestic outsourcing. Relevant publications include Domestic Outsourcing in the U.S.: A Research Agenda to Assess Trends and Effects on Job Quality (with Annette Bernhardt, Rosemary Batt, and Susan Houseman),  Domestic Outsourcing, Rent Seeking, and Increasing Inequality, and “The Networked Organization: Implications for Jobs and Inequality,” also with Rosemary Batt, in Making Work More Equal (D. Grimshaw et al.)

Andrea Atencio is a labor economist pursuing an Economics PhD at the University of Illinois (UIUC). Before joining the University of Illinois, she worked in the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. At these institutions, Atencio’s research mostly focused on the implications of legal and social institutions on the gender wage gap in countries over the whole spectrum of development.

More recently, Atencio has studied the role of domestic outsourcing on the decline of labor fluidity that the U.S. has experienced in the last few decades. In particular, she has quantified how much of the observed drop in worker reallocations can be attributed to domestic outsourcing; this research adds labor fluidity indicators to the list of measurement issues which we can incur for not accounting for outsourced workers. Her current research focuses on how domestic outsourcing has altered the labor market structure and the mechanisms behind these changes. Atencio’s other research investigates labor market frictions in developing economies and the relationship between recruitment effort, firm growth and aggregate productivity.

Kate Bahn is the director of labor market policy and economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Her areas of research include gender, race, and ethnicity in the labor market, care work, and monopsonistic labor markets. Previously, she was an Economist at the Center for American Progress. Bahn also serves as the executive vice president and secretary for the International Association for Feminist Economics. She has published popular economics writing for a variety of publications, including The Guardian, The Nation, Salon, and Newsweek, as well as scholarly research published in Feminist Economics and Gender, Work & Organization. Bahn received her Ph.D. in economics from the New School for Social Research and her B.A. from Hampshire College.