The imbalance of PhDs’ socioeconomic backgrounds
Economics PhDs are more likely to have highly educated parents and come from a more socioeconomically advantaged background — and that’s a problem.
Faculty
Anna Stansbury is the Class of 1948 Career Development Assistant Professor and an Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and is in the core faculty of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research. She is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Stansbury’s research focuses on topics in labor and macro economics, particularly on issues to do with inequality, power, and institutions in the labor market. In recent work, she has studied the extent of employer concentration in the US labor market, the macroeconomic effects of the decline of worker power in the US, and the incentives for minimum wage non-compliance in the US and the UK.
Stansbury holds a BA in economics from Cambridge University, a Master's in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, and an MA and PhD in economics from Harvard University.
More information about her research can be found on her personal website at annastansbury.com
Schubert, Gregor, Anna Stansbury, and Bledi Taska, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6465-21. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, January 2021.
Anna Stansbury and Lawrence H. Summers. In Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Washington, D.C.: April 2020.
Stansbury, Anna, Dan Turner, and Ed Balls. VoxEU, March 6, 2023.
Stansbury, Anna, Dan Turner, and Ed Balls, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6836-23. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, 2023.
Dynan, Karen, Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, and Anna Stansbury, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6810-22. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, July 2022. PIEE Working Paper No. 22-11.
Stansbury, Anna. Harvard Business Review, June 10, 2022.
Economics PhDs are more likely to have highly educated parents and come from a more socioeconomically advantaged background — and that’s a problem.
Research topics include analyzing firm behavior, data-driven sequential decision-making, inequality and worker power, and renewable energy integration.
"It's a travesty that in the richest country in the world, and in the richest period in global history, so many workers are struggling."
Finance degrees have been losing out to STEM degrees, a research paper [by Prof. Anna Stansbury and co-authors] has found.
"It seems very likely that a lot of companies will be rethinking this longer-term and outsourcing those kinds of jobs that didn’t used to be."
Now, it's less about threats and more about the trade-offs between people and profits.