Kathryn Shaw is a nationally recognized expert on labor economics who addresses human resource management, wages, and discrimination issues. She has been retained in high-profile labor matters and has expertise in class certification issues.
Professor Shaw is the incoming president of the Society of Labor Economists, to serve from 2022 through 2025 (first as the President-elect). She is known for having co-developed the research field of “insider econometrics,” which uses internal (or “inside”) company data to analyze how practices such as teamwork and incentive pay affect performance.
In her recent research, Professor Shaw has worked on artificial intelligence (AI) topics, including how the performance of firms improves with uses of AI. She has also analyzed talent management in the software and other knowledge-intensive industries. Her new research papers are focused on different aspects of successful entrepreneurship.
Professor Shaw’s research has been published in the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Labor Economics, and the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy. She was associate editor of the Journal of Labor Economics and the Review of Economics and Statistics, and editor of IZA World of Labor. Professor Shaw is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), where she coheads the Personnel Economics working group.
Professor Shaw has been honored with multiple awards for excellence in teaching. She teaches courses on personnel economics, people management and organizational strategy, and the impact of AI on productivity.
Before joining the faculty at Stanford, Professor Shaw was the Ford Distinguished Research Chair and Professor of Economics at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. She has also held visiting academic appointments at University College London, the MIT Sloan School of Management, and the University of Paris.
Earlier in her career, Professor Shaw served as a Senate-confirmed member of the U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers in the Clinton administration, and as visiting economist to the Board of Governors at the Federal Reserve.