Ph.D. in economics, University of California, Los Angeles; B.S. in economics, Brigham Young University
Matthew Baird is an economist at the RAND Corporation whose research focuses primarily on understanding labor markets to improve outcomes for disadvantaged populations. Examples of this research include evaluating through an RCT a job training pipeline for underemployed workers, an analysis of dentist location and the effects on access to care, an evaluation of low-income minority students' access to effective teachers, and a development of new methodology to evaluate disequilibrium in specialized labor markets, with an application to the labor market for anesthesiologists. Baird's research more generally spans the fields of labor, demographics, and education. His recent and current research includes evaluating the role of non-wage benefits in occupation and job transition and its relationship to inequality interventions, strategic transfers to qualify for long term care Medicaid coverage, belief formation of housing prices, evaluations of principal training programs and personalized learning intervenions, an analysis of for-profit college response to increases and decreases in student federal financial benefits, an evaluation of minority timing of STEM major drop-outs in college, and development of methodology to compare the trade-offs of the number of years included when evaluating worker productivity. He also assists with the American Life Panel, leading the weighting and sampling of the surveys. Baird has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
