Anna Stansbury

Anna Stansbury and Rodrigo Verdi (Accounting) each received an Outstanding Teacher Award at the MIT Sloan Excellence in Teaching Awards. Each year, students nominate instructors for these teaching awards and the final recipients are chosen based on the quantity and quality of their nominations.
 

Anna Stansbury, Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies, has won the 2021 Upjohn Institute Dissertation Award (First Prize). With this annual award, the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research recognizes the best PhD dissertations on employment-related policies and issues, from any academic discipline, but requiring a substantial policy thrust to inform better policymaking.

Stansbury’s winning dissertation is entitled “Essays on Power in Labor Markets.” For more detail beyond her dissertation summary, these full papers are very similar to the three essays in her dissertation:

1) “Employer Concentration and Outside Options”

2) “The Declining Worker Power Hypothesis”

3) “Do US Firms Have an Incentive to Comply with the FLSA and NLRA?”

and “Under the Wage Floor:  Exploring Firms’ Incentives to Comply with the Minimum Wage”

The recent award announcement regarding the winners notes the “path-breaking contributions to our understanding of some of the most salient employment issues of our time, including the bargaining power of workers…” that “…undoubtedly will influence not only future academic research but also our thinking about a range of state and federal social policies” (Susan N. Houseman, Vice President and Director of Research at the Upjohn Institute).