Eileen Appelbaum
Senior Economist and Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research
Senior Economist and Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research
Eileen is a Senior Economist and Co-Director of CEPR and fellow at Rutgers University Center for Women and Work. She has held visiting positions at the Wissenschaftszentrum (Berlin), University of Manchester and Leicester University (UK), University of South Australia, and University of Auckland (New Zealand). Prior to joining CEPR, she held positions as distinguished professor and director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University and as professor of economics at Temple University. She holds a PhD in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Since 2010, Eileen’s research has focused on financialization of the economy and the role of private equity in financial engineering and restructuring of companies for financial gain. Her recent work has examined the financialization of health care. She has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles, chapters in books, working papers, and pieces in an array of outlets, including The Hill and The American Prospect.
Her book, Private Equity at Work: When Wall Street Manages Main Street, coauthored with Rosemary Batt, was selected by the Academy of Management as one of the four best books of 2014 and 2015 and was a finalist for the 2016 George R. Terry award. This book was the first to provide a balanced examination of private equity’s effects on the companies they acquire and the workers in those companies. It has had an important and widely acknowledged impact on research and policy on private equity.
Prior to 2010, Eileen’s research focused on organizational restructuring and outcomes for firms and workers regarding low-wage jobs, new technology and work organization, and work-family policy. She has published peer-reviewed articles in a range of journals, including Review of Radical Political Economics, British Journal of Industrial Relations, JAMA Health Forum, and Advances in Health Care Management. Her book, Unfinished Business: Paid Family Leave in California and the Future of U.S. Work-Family Policy, coauthored with Ruth Milkman, examines the effects of paid family leave in California on employers and employees. It has been widely cited in discussions of national paid family and medical leave policy.
Several of her earlier books — The New American Workplace: Transforming Work Systems in the United States with Rosemary Batt, Low Wage America: How Employers Are Reshaping Opportunity in the Workplace with Annette Bernhardt and Richard Murnane, and Manufacturing Advantage: Why High Performance Work Systems Pay Off with Peter Berg, Thomas Bailey and Arne Kalleberg — were selected by Princeton University for its distinguished list of Noteworthy Books in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics.
New Medicaid work requirement rules could remove eligible people from coverage through red tape, but states may be able to limit the damage.
The Trump proposal to open up workers’ retirement accounts to private equity investments is a thinly disguised bailout for struggling Wall Street firms.
Paid leave is overwhelmingly popular with the public, and provides workers with an essential benefit. But it is still not available to millions of workers.
A long-awaited Trump administration rule appears to give the private equity industry a valuable gift.
Proposed regulations create legal safe harbors that limit employer liability while allowing greater exposure of workers’ retirement savings to complex and risky investments.
Private equity funds have moved in on life insurance business, and there are growing signs that individual retirement funds could be at risk.
The Trump administration’s idea of dealing with health care affordability: Promoting shoddy insurance coverage that shifts costs to patients.
Private equity fundraising is still in trouble — which explains the rise of secondary funds and ‘continuation vehicles.’ Is it all just a way of delaying the inevitable reckoning?
The private equity industry enters 2026 with many of the same problems it has faced for years. Is a reckoning in store?
Private insurers are ending the open enrollment period looking for ways to extract more profits from the Medicare Advantage program.