2026 Speaker
Professor Jesse Rothstein
Jesse Rothstein is Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Carmel P. Friesen Chair in Public Policy and the David Pierpont Gardner Chair in Higher Education. He is the co-director of the California Policy Lab, which he co-founded, with Till von Wachter, in 2017, and the director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education. He serves on the boards of the Society of Labor Economists and the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. He previously served as Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor; as Senior Economist with the Council of Economic Advisers, Executive Office of the President; and as director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) at UC Berkeley.
Title of the Lecture: “Good Jobs and Bad Jobs”
Abstract: Labor economics has been revolutionized by the advent of big administrative data and econometric methods to make use of it. One clear finding from this recent work is that workers’ earnings potential depends importantly on the firm at which they work. Where standard models of the labor market imply that workers should be paid the same wage at any job open to them, the data indicates otherwise: Some firms systematically pay high wages, while others pay less for the very same workers. What to make of this variation? Does it reflect non-competitive behavior, or is it merely market compensation for other job characteristics that make jobs more and less attractive? I’ll discuss recent research that helps us begin to understand why pay varies so much and what it tells us about the operation of the labor market.
Day: April 24th
Time: 4:30 PM
Location: CUE 203
Abstract: Labor economics has been revolutionized by the advent of big administrative data and econometric methods to make use of it. One clear finding from this recent work is that workers’ earnings potential depends importantly on the firm at which they work. Where standard models of the labor market imply that workers should be paid the same wage at any job open to them, the data indicates otherwise: Some firms systematically pay high wages, while others pay less for the very same workers. What to make of this variation? Does it reflect non-competitive behavior, or is it merely market compensation for other job characteristics that make jobs more and less attractive? I’ll discuss recent research that helps us begin to understand why pay varies so much and what it tells us about the operation of the labor market.
Day: April 24th
Time: 4:30 PM
Location: CUE 203