Benjamin Glasner, Ph.D.
Research on U.S. labor markets, place-based policy, and the design of the social safety net.
I am Benjamin Glasner, a Senior Economist at the Economic Innovation Group in Washington, D.C., and an affiliate at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. I study U.S. labor markets, place-based policy, and the design of social policy, with a focus on worker well-being, economic mobility, and how national policy choices play out in local economies.
My work combines applied microeconomics, policy evaluation, and public communication. The aim is straightforward: produce research that is empirically defensible, clear enough to travel outside academia, and useful to the policymakers, journalists, and practitioners who have to act on it.
What I Work On
Wages and Work
I study low-wage work, labor-market power, worker classification, and how policy design shapes earnings and opportunity.
Place-Based Policy
I analyze how national policy reshapes local labor markets, housing supply, and regional economic resilience.
Transfers and Poverty
I study how safety-net programs change employment and well-being, and how poverty and mobility evolve over the long run.
Selected Highlights
- Peer-reviewed research on child tax credits, low-wage work, and the gig economy, with publications in Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Public Economics, and Health Affairs.
- Public-facing policy research on Opportunity Zones, retirement-plan access, and the 80-80 wage subsidy proposal.
- Open-research and reproducibility work aimed at making public economic analysis traceable from data to claim.
- Translation of quantitative research into reports, essays, interviews, and media appearances for non-specialist audiences.
Current Goals
- Produce research that sharpens the policy case for higher earnings, better job quality, and stronger labor-market attachment for low-wage workers.
- Measure how housing constraints, local economic change, and place-based policy reshape growth and mobility across U.S. communities.
- Build arguments that move cleanly from evidence to interpretation to policy design.