Dear RSF:
Please join us next Wednesday, January 15, at 11 in the library and on Zoom for a presentation by Visiting Scholar Nathan Wilmers entitled “The Decline of Labor Market Inequality.” Click here for a background chapter for your review.
Wilmers is Sarofim Family Career Development Associate Professor and an Associate Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and in the core faculty of the Institute for Work and Employment Research and affiliated with the Economic Sociology program.
He researches wage and earnings inequality, economic sociology, and the sociology of labor. In his empirical research, he studies how wage stagnation and rising earnings inequality result from weakening labor market institutions, changing market power, and job restructuring. His research has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, ILR Review, Journal of Labor Economics, PNAS, and Social Forces. Wilmers won the Academy of Management Organization and Management Theory award for best paper in 2020 as well as the ASQ (Administration Science Quarterly) Dissertation Award in 2021. He holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Chicago and an MA and PhD in sociology from Harvard University.
At RSF he has been working on a book which explores the extent to which the unexpected decline in inequality over the last decade might lead to lasting wage gains for low-wage workers. Drawing on administrative and survey data, he is examining the extent to which firm composition changes contributed to the decline in inequality and how employers reallocated tasks within low-wage jobs to support higher productivity and higher pay.