Faculty
Anna Stansbury is the Class of 1948 Career Development Assistant Professor and an Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and is in the core faculty of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research. She is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Stansbury’s research focuses on topics in labor and macro economics, particularly on issues to do with inequality, power, and institutions in the labor market. In recent work, she has studied the extent of employer concentration in the US labor market, the macroeconomic effects of the decline of worker power in the US, and the incentives for minimum wage non-compliance in the US and the UK.
Stansbury holds a BA in economics from Cambridge University, a Master's in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, and an MA and PhD in economics from Harvard University.
More information about her research can be found on her personal website at annastansbury.com
Featured Publication
"Employer Concentration and Outside Options."Schubert, Gregor, Anna Stansbury, and Bledi Taska, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6465-21. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, January 2021.
Featured Publication
"The Declining Worker Power Hypothesis: An Explanation for the Recent Evolution of the American Economy."Anna Stansbury and Lawrence H. Summers. In Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Washington, D.C.: April 2020.
Stansbury, Anna. ILR Review Vol. 78, No. 1 (2025): 190-216.
Stansbury, Anna. The Hill, September 12, 2024.
Compton, Chris, Enas Farag, Marshall Steinbaum, Alaa Abdelfattah, and Anna Stansbury, Working Paper. August 2024.
Stansbury, Anna and Kyra Rodriguez, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7130-24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, August 2024.
New research from MIT Sloan shows stiffer penalties are needed to incentivize employers to pay workers a minimum wage.
A cost-benefit analysis demonstrates how minimum wage enforcement structures in the US and the UK incentivize noncompliance and quantify the policy changes needed to protect workers.
Independently of race or gender, people's family circumstances and class status can hold them back.
"Unscrupulous firms that break the law undermine the businesses that want to be ethical."
As the share of graduates in the UK workforce has expanded over the past 25 years, the wage premium they command has fallen.
