IWER
Public Policy
Exploring the Impact of the U.S. Election on Jobs and the Economy
By
That was the topic of a panel discussion held October 29, 2024 at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The event, which was sponsored by the MIT Sloan People and Organizations Club and the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research (IWER), featured a faculty panel that reflected a range of political views: It included one MIT Sloan faculty member who served in the Biden administration and one who served in the Trump administration.
More than 125 MIT students, faculty, and staff attended the event, completely filling the classroom where it was held. Namrata Kala, an Associate Professor of Applied Economics at MIT Sloan, served as moderator of the panel, and the three panelists were: S.P. Kothari, the Gordon Y Billard Professor of Accounting and Finance at MIT Sloan; Catherine Wolfram, the William Barton Rogers Professor in Energy and a Professor of Applied Economics at MIT Sloan, and Thomas A. Kochan, the George Maverick Bunker Professor Emeritus at MIT Sloan and a faculty member in IWER.
From 2019 to 2021, Kothari served as Chief Economist and Director of the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and Wolfram served from March 2021 to October 2022 as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Climate and Energy Economics at the U.S. Treasury.
The panel discussion encompassed varying views about the impacts of a Trump or Harris administration, on topics ranging from tariffs to climate policy, borrowing costs, regulation, immigration, the child tax credit, and the need for high-quality labor-management partnerships that can increase productivity.
While the panelists didn’t agree about everything, Kochan expressed a sentiment that many people probably would agree with: “I am dreadfully worried about the deep, deep divisions in our society,” he said.
Kochan added that that he thought the only way to heal those divisions was to pay more attention to the people who have been left behind economically in the past few decades, and that the next administration should emphasize creating good jobs.
