Greg Wright is a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings in the Global Economy and Development program. He was previously a senior fellow leading the Workforce of the Future initiative.
The initiative produces analysis and data-driven tools to help steer economic development policy toward strategies that increase the quality of jobs and promote career pathways out of low-wage work. This research is recently embodied in the Smart Growth Cities tool, which guides regional policymakers toward locally feasible, equitable, and growth-oriented industry strategies and provides detailed information about the workforce required to achieve them.
The initiative also focuses on immigration policy, recently publishing a Roadmap for Immigration Reform. This report first introduces a quantitative approach to assessing the centrality of immigrant-intensive occupations to the U.S. economy now and over the next decade. The report then shows that because of this centrality, recent declines in immigration have exacerbated a wide range of labor market dysfunction, for instance in agriculture and the care industry.
Wright’s academic work has focused on the labor market impacts of globalization, immigration, and technological change and has appeared in top economics journals including the American Economic Review, the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Journal of the European Economic Association, and the Journal of International Economics. Recent papers have estimated the impact of offshoring and immigration on U.S. jobs, the impact of investments in information and communications technologies on wage inequality, and the historical impact of globalization on labor markets.
Wright has a B.A. in astrophysics from UC Berkeley and an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from UC Davis.
See more on his personal website.
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Current Positions
- Associate Professor, University of California, Merced
- Research Affiliate, CESifo
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Past Positions
- Senior Fellow, Global Economy and Development, Brookings (2023)
- Fellow, Global Economy and Development, Brookings (2021-2023)
- Chair of the Department of Economics and Business Management, University of California, Merced (2020-2021)
- Assistant Professor, University of California, Merced (2014-2020)
- Lecturer, University of Essex (2011-2013)
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Education
- Ph.D. in Economics, University of California, Davis (2011)
- M.A. in Economics, University of California, David (2006)
- B.A. in Astrophysics, University of California, Berkeley (1998)