Mallika Thomas

Mallika Thomas is a nonresident fellow in Economic Studies at Brookings and a former Rubenstein Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is a labor economist, and her research focuses on such topics as wage inequality, human capital formation and educational investments, both on- and off-the-job, labor market discrimination, and the persistence of the gender wage gap.  In her work, Thomas has undertaken a substantive study of the gender gap in promotions, establishing a framework to understand and quantify the role of employer beliefs and employer-based discrimination in labor market outcomes, relative to other sources of gender disparities in outcomes. In addition, she studies the labor market impacts of parental leave policies and how such policies affect hiring and retention as well as employer-sponsored training and wage growth. In her recent work, she studies inequality in both earnings and in non-wage benefits, pioneering a new method to measure the value that workers place on the non-wage benefits of the job.  Her work examines how this impacts our measurements of inequality, considering both wages and the dollar value of non-wage benefits and the implications this may have for market and non-market work in a changing environment.

Previously, Mallika was Assistant Professor of Economics at Cornell University and Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago and holds a B.S. in Physics and B.A. in Economics from Yale University. She has received a number of awards during her academic career, including the University of Chicago Presidential Fellowship, the George Stigler dissertation award, and the American Economic Association dissertation fellowship. Her research has been featured in outlets such as the New York Times, Business Insider, and Time Magazine.

Visit Mallika’s personal website.