Eileen Appelbaum is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, DC, Fellow at Rutgers University Center for Women and Work, and Visiting Professor at the University of Leicester, UK. Prior to joining CEPR, she held positions as Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University and as Professor of Economics at Temple University.  She holds a PhD in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Appelbaum’s research focuses on organizational restructuring and outcomes for firms and workers; private equity and financialization; and work-family policies. Private Equity at Work: When Wall Street Manages Main Street, coauthored with Rosemary Batt, was selected by the Academy of Management as one of the four best books of 2014 and 2015, and was a finalist for the 2016 George R. Terry award. Unfinished Business, coauthored with Ruth Milkman, examines the effects of paid family leave in California on employers and employees. It has been widely cited in discussions of national paid family and medical leave policy. Her current research examines the implications of consolidation of hospitals and decentralization of health services to outpatient care centers for the jobs of non-professional employees in these two segments of the healthcare industry.

Several of Dr. Appelbaum’s earlier books – The New American Workplace with Rosemary Batt, Low Wage America with Annette Bernhardt and Richard Murnane, and Manufacturing Advantage with Peter Berg, Thomas Bailey and Arne Kalleberg – were selected by Princeton University for its distinguished list of Noteworthy Books in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics.

She has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals, including “Domestic Outsourcing, Rent Seeking, and Increasing Inequality,” RRPE, 2017: 1-16 and “Implications of Financial Capitalism for Employment Relations Research: Evidence from Breach of Trust and Implicit Contracts in Private Equity Buyouts,” British Journal of Industrial Relations 51(3): 498–518, 2013.

By this expert

How Public Real Estate Investment Trusts Extract Wealth from Nursing Homes and Hospitals

Article | Aug 1, 2022

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) are considered “passive” investors and are exempt from corporate tax. But in reality, they play a very active role in reshaping whole industries, like healthcare.

The Role of Public REITs in Financialization and Industry Restructuring

Paper Working Paper Series | | Jul 2022

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) are considered “passive” investors and are exempt from corporate tax. But in reality, they play a very active role in reshaping whole industries, like healthcare.

Spilt Milk: COVID-19 and the Dangers of Dairy Industry Consolidation

Paper Working Paper Series | | Aug 2020

Consolidation in the dairy industry has created separate, inflexible supply chains for consumers and commercial markets. When COVID killed commercial demand, perfectly good milk and cheese was wasted.

How Dairy Monopolies Keep Milk Off the Shelves

Article | Aug 19, 2020

Consolidation in the dairy industry has created separate, inflexible supply chains for consumers and commercial markets. When COVID killed commercial demand, perfectly good milk and cheese was wasted.

Featuring this expert

Global Inflation Today: What Is to Be Done?

PERI Conference, featuring INET Research Director Thomas Ferguson and INET Grantees

Event Conference | Dec 2–Nov 3, 2022

Emerging out of the COVID lockdown, inflation in the U.S. and globally has risen to the highest levels in 40 years. On December 2-3, PERI will host a conference to explore the causes of this global inflation spike. Conference participants will also provide critical perspectives on the austerity macroeconomic policies being implemented globally to control inflation and will propose alternative policies capable of managing inflation without imposing austerity and rising mass unemployment.

INET Working Paper on the consolidation of the dairy industry is cited in Homeland Security Today

News May 17, 2021

“Larger dairy farms inevitably mean a system less geographically dispersed, larger environmental challenges with farm waste, and a less resilient system. The Institute for New Economic Thinking detailed these impacts in a recent report on the pandemic’s effects on dairy farmers, Spilt Milk: COVID-19 and the Dangers of Dairy Industry Consolidation: “The COVID-19 pandemic led to the collapse in commercial demand as restaurants, caterers, schools and other institutional customers were forced to close. Dairy plants serving supermarkets and grocery stores were already operating at close to full capacity when the coronavirus struck. Capital equipment specialized to produce for commercial customers were incapable of producing for consumers served by supermarkets or food banks. Some farmers had no choice but to dump milk.”[9] For the smaller dairy farmers, international (primarily Canadian) competition and price fluctuations are daily economic challenges.” — Charles Luke, Homeland Security Today … [9] Eileen Appelbaum and Jared Gaby-Biegle, “Spilt Milk: COVID-19 and the Dangers of Dairy Industry Consolidation,” Institute for Economic and Policy Research, August 15, 2020, https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/WP_134-Appelbaum-and-Gaby-Biegel.pdf

Appelbaum & Batt’s INET funded research is cited in the Boston Globe

News Apr 5, 2021

“In “Private Equity’s Engagement With Health Care: Cause for Concern?” a report to the Institute for New Economic Thinking, researchers Eileen Applebaum and Rosemary Batt found that wages dropped at urgent care centers after acquisitions by private equity companies. They were 9 to 12 percent lower than hospital wages. More consolidation and Amazon’s relentless drive to suppress costs bode more of the same.” — Brian Alexander, Boston Globe

Appelbaum and Batt’s research into Private Equity buyouts is cited in Emergency Medical News

News Jan 5, 2021

“The landscape of EM has consolidated into a few corporate conglomerates, which are oligarchies with iron grips on contracts through noncompetitive or illegal collusions with large hospital systems in the form of kickbacks. (Institute for New Economic Thinking. March 15, 2020; https://bit.ly/34fLeMD.) This has effectively castrated any hope for independent practices to thrive and injected many wrongful consequences into EM.” — Rizvi, Saba MD, Emergency Medical News