Brad Hershbein is a senior economist and deputy director of research at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. He also serves as a communications advisor at the Institute, helping guide dissemination of our research publications. He has also served as a non-resident fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, is an IZA@LISER Research Fellow, and currently serves as an editor of the Journal of Labor Economics.
His research focuses on the transition between education and career and how employers hire and compensate workers. His work spans higher education access and completion, the long-term effects of recessions on places and employer skill demands, and measuring both employer market power and nontraditional work activities such as contracting and outsourcing. Recently, he also examined how strong labor markets affects aspects of job quality and the degree to which higher education programs respond to major-specific changes in employers’ demand for workers. A data product he created, the New Hires Quality Index, charts how the earnings power of different groups of newly hired workers has changed over time.
His work has appeared in several leading academic journals and has been covered by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and other national outlets. He earned his BA in economics from Harvard College, and his MA and PhD, both also in economics, from the University of Michigan. Before graduate school, he worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.