Rosemary Batt
Senior Research Fellow
Rosemary Batt is a senior research fellow at CEPR and professor emeritus at the Industrial and Labor Relations School at Cornell University. She has held visiting academic positions at Warwick University (UK), Manchester University (UK), the Danish Technical University, the Laboratoire Economique et Social du Travail, Centre de Recherche National de Science (France), and the Universite Rovira i Virgili (Spain). She received her Ph.D. from the Sloan School of Management, MIT.
Her academic and policy research examines the political economy of labor, with an emphasis on the relationship between state regulation, industry restructuring, and labor outcomes. Her work explains how changes in regulation and new forms of ownership — private equity, franchising, outsourcing, and subcontracting of work – affect low wage service industries, including telecommunications, call centers, hospitality, and healthcare.
Since 2010, her research with CEPR Co-Director Eileen Appelbaum has focused on the processes and outcomes of financialization across industries, especially in healthcare. The research has provided the empirical evidence to substantiate the need for specific reforms to improve outcomes for labor and consumers and inform public policy makers.
Batt has published over 100 books, book chapters, peer-reviewed articles, working papers, and other articles. She is co-author with Eileen Appelbaum of two award-winning books, The New American Workplace (ILR Press, 1994) and Private Equity at Work: When Wall Street Manages Main Street (Russell Sage, 2014). She also co-edited The Oxford Handbook on the Organization of Work (OUP, 2004).Batt and Appelbaum’s forthcoming book is Healthcare in the Age of Finance Capital: Public Funds for Private Gain (Princeton University Press, 2026).