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John S. Earle is a Professor of Public Policy in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. His main research interests are in labor, development, transition, and institutions, including topics such as employment policies, financial constraints, reallocation, productivity, and entrepreneurship.

Although trained as an economist, Earle’s work is multi-disciplinary. It ranges across the fields of economics, political science, finance, management, and labor studies. His research has been supported by several grants from the National Science Foundation and the European Union as well as by private foundations.  In 2019, he received a grant co-sponsored by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and Russell Sage Foundation to research non-standard employment.

Before coming to Mason, he taught at Stanford University, Stockholm School of Economics, University of Vienna, and Central European University, and held research positions at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics.

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.

Andy Garin is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

His research lies at the intersection of labor economics and public economics. He studies how the structure of labor markets determines who bears the benefit or burden of changes in policy or economic structure. He is particularly interested in the ways that gig workers are shaping the employment landscape, and how policy might best adapt to promote opportunity in 21st century labor markets.

He completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 2018. His dissertation, “Essays on the Economics of Labor Demand and Policy Incidence” was awarded the first-place prize for the W.E. Upjohn Institute's 2018 Dissertation Award, which recognizes “the best PhD dissertation on employment-related issues.”

Erica Groshen is Senior Labor Economics Advisor at Cornell University--ILR, Research Fellow at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and serves as a member of the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Council and the Committee on National Statistics of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. From 2013 to 2017, she served as 14th Commissioner of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Prior to that she served as Vice President in the Research and Statistics Group of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Her research centers on employers’ roles in labor market outcomes and the future of work. Dr. Groshen received the 2017 Susan C. Eaton Outstanding Scholar-Practitioner Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association and was appointed a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2020.

Beth Gutelius is the Research Director of the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Senior Researcher at the Great Cities Institute. Her academic and consulting career has focused on urban economic development, labor markets, and the changing nature of employment. Beth has studied the logistics sector for more than a decade and is a leading expert on employment in the warehousing industry. In 2019 she co-authored the report, The Future of Warehouse Work: Technological Change in the U.S. Logistics Industry, with Dr. Nik Theodore. Her current research projects include a study of third-party outsourcing in logistics funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Gutelius received her Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Policy from The University of Illinois at Chicago.

Susan Helper is the Carlton Professor of Economics at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. She was formerly chief economist at the U.S. Department of Commerce and a member of the White House staff. She has served as chair of the economics department and has been a visiting scholar at University of Oxford, the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a Research Associate at NBER and Co-Director of CIFAR’s Project on Innovation, Equity, and the Future of Prosperity.

Her research focuses on supply chain globalization, technology implementation that enhances job quality, and creation of supply chains for a low-carbon economy (see "Green Supply Chains Can Strengthen the Middle Class").  

Her reports, Next Generation Supply Chains,  “Supply Chains and Equitable Growth,” and “Value first, cost later: Total value contribution as a new approach to sourcing decisions,” focus on the globalization of supply chains and ways that U.S. manufacturing might be revitalized.

Dr. Helper received her PhD in Economics from Harvard and her BA from Oberlin College in Economics, Government, and Spanish.

John Horton is the Richard S. Leghorn (1939) Career Development Professor and an Associate Professor of Information Technologies at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Horton's research focuses on the intersection of labor economics, market design, and information systems. He is particularly interested in improving the efficiency and equity of matching markets.  His recent study on ride-sharing markets has been cited in articles by the Wall Street Journal and Quartz.  He is co-author of “Digitization and the Contract Labor Market,” in Economic Analysis of the Digital Economy (Avi Goldfarb, Shane M. Greenstein, and Catherine E. Tucker, eds).

After completing his PhD and prior to joining NYU Stern School of Business in 2013, he served for two years as the staff economist for oDesk, an online labor market.

Horton received a BS in mathematics from the United States Military Academy at West Point and a PhD in public policy from Harvard University.

Dmitri Koustas is an Assistant Professor at The Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. He specializes in labor economics and macroeconomics, with research areas in the “future of work” and household finance. An important vein of his research focuses on measuring and understanding the reasons why households participate in alternative work arrangements like the gig economy. His research pioneers new and innovative datasets, including bank and credit card data (see “What Do Big Data Tell Us About Why People Take Gig Economy Jobs”), IRS tax returns (see his co-authored paper “Is Gig Work Replacing Traditional Employment? Evidence from Two Decades of Tax Returns” ), and direct partnerships with cities and technology companies. He is the author of multiple studies examining the labor supply of self-employed and gig economy workers. In 2019, he and Andy Garin were awarded a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation for the study, “Are Alternative Work Arrangements the Future of (Part-Time) Work? Evidence from Tax Records?”

Koustas received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018.

Kyung Min Lee is a Junior Professional Officer at Finance, Competitiveness, and Innovation Global Practice of the World Bank Group. He is also an affiliated faculty at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. His research studies entrepreneurship, firm growth, innovation, technology adoption, and labor market outcomes. For his research he analyzes large firm-level surveys and administrative databases. He also conducts firm-level surveys for cross-country studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the George Mason University.

Collaborating with John S. Earle and J. David Brown, he is currently studying non-standard employment using the Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs. In 2019, they presented Who Hires Non-Standard Labor? Evidence from Employers at the IZA Conference.

Kyung Min received the Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in 2018. He was also awarded the Joseph L. Fisher Public Policy Doctoral Student Award from the Schar School at George Mason University in 2019.