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.
Eileen AppelbaumThe Hill, October 26, 2015
Eileen AppelbaumThe Huffington Post, October 23, 2015
Eileen AppelbaumThe Hill, September 29, 2015
The Wall Street Journal reported last Friday that private equity “firms’ stakes in a dozen publicly traded energy exploration-and-production companies have lost more than $18 billion in value since last summer, when oil prices began their slide from more
The stock market hovered at or near record highs throughout 2014, leading to high valuations for private equity-owned portfolio companies since prices for these companies are typically benchmarked to comparable publicly traded firms. With companies fetchi
There is a growing consensus among economists that U.S. economic growth is impaired by the steep rise in inequality that is squeezing a middle class built in Pittsburgh and elsewhere across the nation by a once vibrant union movement committed to norms of
Eileen AppelbaumThe Huffington Post, July 21, 2015
The Conservative victory in the recent UK national election allowed the party to form a government without the need for coalition partners, and to put its stamp on economic policy without the need to compromise. It’s the first time since 1996 that the Con
Eileen AppelbaumThe Hill, July 2, 2015
Consider: PitchBook data tracks 300 public pension funds that are currently invested in private equity (PE) funds, many with investments in multiple funds. Public pension funds—the deferred income of public sector workers whose services are paid for by ta