Matthew Baird is an economist at the RAND Corporation, co-director of the Center for Causal Inference, and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. His research focuses primarily on understanding labor markets and education policy to improve outcomes for disadvantaged populations. Examples of his research include a job training pipeline for underemployed workers evaluated through an RCT, evaluations of STEM major attrition and the STEM education to STEM workforce pipeline for minorities, an examination of low-income minority students' access to effective teachers, the development of new methodology to evaluate disequilibrium in specialized labor markets and the implications for access to care, and evaluations of the state policy of health providers' work decisions and resulting access to healthcare.
Baird's research more generally spans the fields of labor, education, and demographics. For example, his research additionally includes evaluating the role of non-wage benefits in occupation and job transition and its relationship to inequality interventions, analyses of how public investment in low-income neighborhoods can succeed, understanding changes in psychological distress and other health outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic, evaluations of principal training programs and personalized learning education interventions, analysis of for-profit college response to increases and decreases in student federal financial benefits, and development of methodology to compare the trade-offs of the number of years included when evaluating worker productivity.
Baird has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).