Policy
Policy work, testimony, and reports
Policy papers
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Earned Paid Time Off Should Be a Basic Right
The Hamilton Project, Brookings Institution · 2026
Follow-up essay returning to the case for a federal guarantee of earned paid time off — accruing with hours worked and usable for any purpose (sickness, caregiving, or rest). Revisits the argument Stevenson made in her 2024 Hamilton Project proposal, in light of continued inaction and the one-third of American workers who still have no paid time off of any kind.
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All Workers Should Be Able to Earn Time Off: The Federal Government Should Guarantee It
The Hamilton Project, Brookings Institution · 2024
Preview essay laying out the case for a federal earned-paid-time-off guarantee. The US is the only high-income country that does not guarantee workers any paid time off; this piece makes the case for modernizing the Fair Labor Standards Act so that every qualified worker can accrue and use paid time off, for any purpose, as part of the national floor on working conditions. Published in February 2024 as the companion to Stevenson's October 2024 Hamilton Project policy proposal.
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Economic and Health Impacts of Paid Parental, Caregiving, and Medical Leave: A Review of Existing Literature and Evidence
with Koryn Kling, H. Luke Shaefer · Poverty Solutions, Report to the State of Michigan · 2024
A review of the existing literature on paid leave programs — parental, caregiving, and medical — and their effects on workers, children, employers, and state economies. The evidence supports statewide paid leave as a cost-effective policy that benefits both families and the broader economy.
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A Federal Guarantee for Earned Paid Time Off
The Hamilton Project, Brookings Institution · 2024
A policy proposal to update the Fair Labor Standards Act to guarantee all workers the right to accrue paid time off — usable for illness, caregiving, or vacation. The United States is the only advanced economy without a national paid-time-off guarantee.
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The Resilient and Adapting Economy
In Evaluating the Quality of Market Competition — 2023 Annual Report on the Health of Democratic Capitalism, Denny Center, Georgetown Law · 2023
Responsive essay to the Denny Center's 2023 annual report on the quality of market competition. Stevenson argues the US economy remains remarkably resilient and capable of adaptation, even as rising industry concentration, slowing productivity, and a falling labor share raise real concerns about whether the benefits of that resilience are being broadly shared.
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An Imperfect Labor Market Recovery
In Denny Center Inaugural Report on the Health of Democratic Capitalism, Georgetown Law · 2022
By mid-2022 the US had recovered all pandemic job losses in aggregate, but the headline hid deep sectoral gaps, persistent labor-force-participation declines, and unequal burdens by gender, race, and occupation. Stevenson's responsive essay to the Denny Center's inaugural report argues the recovery was more fragile than aggregate numbers suggested and that democratic capitalism's legitimacy depends on how widely the gains are shared.
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Women, Work, and Families: Recovering from the Pandemic-Induced Recession
The Hamilton Project, Brookings Institution · 2021
An analysis of how the pandemic recession fell on women, mothers, and caregiving families, and a set of policy recommendations — on child care, paid leave, and the infrastructure of care — for a recovery that rebuilds rather than reinstates the pre-pandemic labor market for women.
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The Initial Impact of COVID-19 on Labor Market Outcomes Across Groups and the Potential for Permanent Scarring
The Hamilton Project, Brookings Institution · 2020
Documents the early unemployment shock from COVID-19 across demographic groups, with particular attention to women, workers of color, and young workers — and the mechanisms by which temporary separations can harden into permanent scarring if policy does not act quickly.
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Paid Leave for Caregiving: Issues and Answers
with Isabel Sawhill · AEI-Brookings Paid Leave Project · 2020
A synthesis of the evidence and policy design questions for paid leave that goes beyond parental leave to include caregiving for aging relatives and people with serious illness. Most Americans are caregivers at some point in their lives; the U.S. labor market is not designed for that reality.
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Business Tax Reform and the Labor Market
with Jason Furman · In Strain (ed.), The U.S. Labor Market, American Enterprise Institute · 2016
Evaluates proposed business tax reforms through the lens of the labor market: who bears the incidence, how investment and wages respond, and which reforms are most likely to raise worker compensation without eroding the corporate tax base.
Congressional testimony
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Building a Resilient Economy: Shoring Up Supply
U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs · March 22, 2022
Testifying on supply constraints and rising inflation, Stevenson argued that while goods-sector inflation was likely to ease with pandemic recovery, the bigger risk was rising service-sector inflation driven by a depressed labor supply — particularly among women, who left the labor force at higher rates than men during the pandemic. She recommended two steps to rebuild labor supply: expanding access to childcare and home nursing care so family caregivers can return to paid work, and funding training and community college programs whose pandemic-era enrollment declines threatened future shortages of skilled workers.
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COVID Child Care Challenges: Supporting Families and Caregivers
U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis · March 2, 2022
Stevenson argued that the U.S. economy now depends critically on reliable childcare access — mothers are among the most educated workers and their labor force participation has been a major engine of growth — yet the childcare sector remained well below pre-pandemic employment and increasingly unaffordable for working families. Her policy recommendation centered on dependable, long-term public investment that decouples what parents can afford from what early educators must be paid, so that childcare programs can remain viable while fairly compensating the workers who staff them.
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Help Wanted: A Stronger Labor Market for Robust Growth
Joint Economic Committee · October 27, 2021
Against the claim that pandemic unemployment benefits were keeping workers on the sidelines, Stevenson pointed out that states ending benefits early saw no job rebound, and argued instead that three other factors were holding back labor supply: the ongoing pandemic itself, unmet caregiving demands for children and adults, and shifts in what workers want from work. Her policy prescription was to support paid family leave, affordable childcare, and early childhood education — investments that reduce the flow of workers out of the labor force and make sustained employment feasible for the two-thirds of young children whose parents all work.
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The Role of Child Care in an Equitable Post-Pandemic Economy
U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs · Subcommittee on Economic Policy · June 23, 2021
Stevenson argued that childcare functions like the banking system — not a boutique service but infrastructure that enables the rest of the economy to function — and that the pandemic had exposed how badly the United States has failed to adapt childcare, workplace flexibility, and parental leave policies to a labor market in which mothers are co-equal earners in most households. She urged the Banking Committee to treat childcare as a structural investment: high-quality early childhood education yields roughly $9 in long-term benefits per $1 invested and would narrow the kindergarten achievement gap, with the Lanham Act of 1940 offering precedent that universal public childcare can work in the U.S.
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The Consequences of Inaction on COVID Tax Legislation
U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means · Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures · September 11, 2020
At a virtual hearing examining the impact on families and small businesses of Congress's failure to extend pandemic-era tax and unemployment provisions — most prominently the HEROES Act passed by the House in May but still stalled in the Senate — Stevenson testified on the labor-market and household-income consequences of continued inaction as initial COVID relief programs expired while the recovery remained incomplete. Her central argument was that the economic cost of delay dwarfed the fiscal cost of acting, and that direct support to households and small employers was essential to prevent a deeper downturn.
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Unemployment Challenges
Washington State Legislative Special Committee on Economic Recovery · June 16, 2020
Stevenson testified before Washington State's Special Committee on Economic Recovery during the early months of the COVID-19 recession, addressing the depth of the labor-market shock and the role of unemployment insurance and federal fiscal support in stabilizing households and preventing the kind of long-term scarring that followed the 2008 downturn.
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Improving Family Stability for the Well-Being of American Children
Joint Economic Committee · February 25, 2020
Stevenson argued that the problems children face in single-parent families stem primarily from insufficient income and socioeconomic stress rather than from family structure itself, and that policies which raise incomes and give parents time — paid family leave, affordable childcare, higher wages for low earners, and expanded refundable tax credits — do more for child well-being than efforts to promote particular family arrangements. Modern families, she argued, need economic security and flexibility to thrive: women's workforce participation has become essential to household income, and maternal responsibilities remain substantial even as father involvement has grown.
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The Employer Information Report (EEO-1)
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission · November 20, 2019
At the EEOC's public hearing on whether to continue collecting pay data through the EEO-1 Component 2, Stevenson argued that reducing explicit and implicit gender, racial, and ethnic pay discrimination requires the intentional evaluation of decisions and outcomes — which in turn requires collecting pay data. She urged the Commission to analyze the 2017 and 2018 data it had already received before abandoning the tool, and noted that the existing binned-data approach already balances usefulness against employer burden because most firms already have the payroll systems to provide this information at minimal additional cost.
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Small Business and the American Worker
U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship · March 6, 2019
Stevenson testified on the conditions facing the modern American worker — arguing that technology is primarily reshaping the tasks workers perform rather than eliminating jobs wholesale, and that what constrains employment is the country's inadequate family-support infrastructure (childcare, paid leave, workplace flexibility) rather than a shortfall in worker skills. She pressed the case that small businesses benefit from, rather than are burdened by, the kinds of family-friendly labor standards that their larger competitors already offer.
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A Record Six Million U.S. Job Vacancies: Reasons and Remedies
Joint Economic Committee · July 12, 2017
Stevenson argued that the record six million job vacancies of mid-2017 fundamentally reflected a strong labor market rather than a skills shortage, since wages were not rising fast enough to signal the bidding war a true shortage would produce. Filling these positions required a mix of strategies: expanding apprenticeships and evidence-based training programs, investing in four-year college access and early childhood education, and restoring the worker bargaining power that non-compete clauses, pay-secrecy rules, and weakened unions had eroded over the preceding decades.
Council of Economic Advisers
2013–2015
As a member of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, Stevenson contributed to several major reports and issue briefs.
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Five Facts About the Gender Pay Gap
Council of Economic Advisers / The White House · 2015
An explainer from the Obama White House CEA laying out five key facts about the gender wage gap: its size, how it varies by age and occupation, the roles of motherhood and occupational sorting, and why the gap matters for the economy as a whole.
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An 'Experiment' in Universal Child Care in the United States: Lessons from the Lanham Act
Council of Economic Advisers / The White House · 2015
Revisits the Lanham Act of 1940 — the only time the United States has operated a federally-funded universal child care program — and draws lessons for contemporary debates over paid leave and subsidized child care.
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Economic Report of the President 2014
with Council of Economic Advisers · Council of Economic Advisers, Executive Office of the President · 2014
The 2014 Economic Report of the President, prepared by the Council of Economic Advisers, reviews the state of the U.S. economy and presents the Administration's economic agenda. Topics include the ongoing recovery from the Great Recession, labor market conditions, long-term growth, reducing inequality, expanding opportunity, and strengthening economic security for working families.
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Understanding the Decline in the Labor Force Participation Rate in the United States
with Steven Braun, Jess Coglianese, Jason Furman, James Stock · Council of Economic Advisers / VoxEU · 2014
A decomposition of the post-2008 decline in U.S. labor force participation into demographic (aging-driven) and behavioral components, with implications for how much 'slack' remains in the labor market.
White House blog posts
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Trends in Occupational Licensing and Best Practices for Smart Labor Market Regulation
with Jeffrey Zients · July 28, 2015
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The Employment Situation in June
July 2, 2015
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Why Access to Free Community College Matters
January 9, 2015
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5 Things You Need to Know About Women and the Economy
September 5, 2014
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Important Tools to Lift Wages and Reduce Poverty, Particularly for Women
with Lily Batchelder · March 26, 2014
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The 2014 Economic Report of the President
with Jason Furman, Jim Stock · March 10, 2014
Additional CEA-era speeches, memoranda, and blog posts are at the Obama White House archive. Stevenson's current board and advisory roles are on the Current appointments page.