Teresa Ghilarducci

Teresa Ghilarducci is the Director of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research and the Irene and Bernard L Schwartz Professor of Economics and Policy Analysis. In 2021, Ghilarducci and SCEPA’s Retirement Equity Lab (ReLab) continued their work investigating the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic recession on older workers. They kicked off 2021 promoting their comprehensive policy agenda for the Biden Administration, featuring a signature proposal to create an Older Workers’ Bureau (OWB) within the U.S. Department of Labor. The Center’s two main research reports, found “The Stalled Jobs Recovery Pushed 1.1 Million Older Workers Out Of The Labor Force” and that “The Pandemic Retirement Surge Increased Retirement Inequality.” The reports were featured on the front page (print and digital) of The New York Times in July and a second time in The New York Times in August, as well as in Yahoo! Finance, Marketplace, Bloomberg, NBC News, Business Insider and more.

Professor Ghilarducci testified in Congress twice in 2021. In March, she testified in the Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs’ hearing entitled, “Who wins on Wall Street? GameStop, Robinhood, & The State of Retail Investing.” Three months later, she testified in the U.S. House of Representative’s Committee on Education & Labor at their hearing, “Examining Pathways to Build a Stronger, More Inclusive Retirement System.” Ghilarducci also spoke at the ASSA’s “Rethinking Inequality” panel in January chaired by James K. Galbraith alongside Joseph E. Stiglitz and Jason Furman. She was a panelist at the AARP and Federal Reserve Bank of America’s virtual event “Addressing the Long-Term Unemployment Crisis.”

In March 2021, Professor Ghilarducci published a bipartisan white paper with Kevin Hassett advocating for expanding the federal government’s employee retirement plan to all working Americans entitled, “What If Low-Income American Workers Had Access to Wealth Building Vehicles Like the Federal Employees’ Thrift Savings Plan?” The pair published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and the proposal received press from NPR, CBS, Yahoo! Finance, Axios and a full opinion piece by the Washington Post’s Editorial Board. Ghilarducci appeared as one of three experts on the “Retirement” episode of Vox’s “Money, Explained” series on Netflix. She continued to publish numerous articles in her Forbes and Bloomberg columns. In July, The New York Review of Books reviewed her book Rescuing Retirement: A Plan to Guarantee Retirement Security for All Americans, co-authored by Tony James. And lastly, in March Ghilarducci hosted a 25th anniversary event for SCEPA featuring Stephanie Kelton, Deirdre McCloskey and Anwar Shiakh on the future of heterodox economics and oversaw SCEPA’s 25-day 25th Anniversary campaign featuring videos, a visual timeline, a custom hashtag and more.