About

Peter Q. Blair is an associate professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he co-directs the Project on Workforce. His research focuses on the link between the future of work and the future of education, labor market discrimination, occupational licensing, and residential segregation. He serves as a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and is the principal investigator of the BE-Lab, a research group with partners from Harvard University, Clemson University, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Blair received his Ph.D. in applied economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, his M.Sc. in theoretical physics from Harvard University, and his B.Sc. in physics and mathematics from Duke University. His background includes understanding markets through early experiences selling fruit and vegetables in the Bahamas. His current sponsored projects include supervising an education randomized controlled trial in India aimed at testing the impact of an all-women's STEM program, and developing assessment tools to measure improvements in technical and non-technical skills among participants.

Research topics

• Labour economics
• Economics
• Demographic economics
• Political Science
• Keynesian economics
• Econometrics
• Mathematics
• Microeconomics
• Statistics

Selected publications

• Skills, degrees, and labor market inequality

  Economics of Education Review · 2025-08-29

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Income inequality between workers with and without bachelor’s degrees has grown sharply over the past 50 years. Canonical explanations attribute this trend to skill-biased technological change, often labeling workers with bachelor’s degrees as “skilled” and those without as “unskilled.” We offer a complementary approach by using the skill requirements of a worker’s current job as a proxy for their skill set. This method enables skill-based comparisons across educational backgrounds and ties observed skills directly to labor market demand. It also broadens the definition of a skilled worker to include those who develop expertise through work experience. We refer to such workers as Skilled Through Alternative Routes (STARs), consistent with the idea that human capital is accumulated not only through formal education but also through on-the-job work experience. Building on this framework, we develop a model of job transitions in which the Absolute Skill Mobility Friction (ASMF) is defined as the elasticity of the flow rate between two occupations with respect to the skill distance separating them. Empirically, we find that STARs and bachelor’s degree holders experience similar mobility frictions when moving between jobs with comparable skill requirements. However, STARs face greater friction than bachelor’s degree holders when moving to higher-wage jobs that demand more skills than their current occupation. This gap in upward mobility persists unmitigated in tight labor markets, suggesting that human capital differences alone do not account for labor market inequality by education.

  PublisherDOI

• Does the United States Spend Enough on Public Schools?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Cognitive Diversity for Creativity and Inclusive Growth

  Angewandte Chemie · 2024-11-26

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Cognitively diverse teams outperform high intelligence (IQ) teams in problem solving, while businesses with at least one woman in their board of directors financially outperform ones with all men boards. These well‐known facts are lost in most academic science enterprises. Herein, we make the case for looking at sources, approaches, and opportunities in expanding cognitive diversity of research teams for high productivity and efficiency.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cognitive Diversity for Creativity and Inclusive Growth

  Angewandte Chemie International Edition · 2024-11-26 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Cognitively diverse teams outperform high intelligence (IQ) teams in problem solving, while businesses with at least one woman in their board of directors financially outperform ones with all men boards. These well-known facts are lost in most academic science enterprises. Herein, we make the case for looking at sources, approaches, and opportunities in expanding cognitive diversity of research teams for high productivity and efficiency.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Does Occupational Licensing Reduce Job Loss During Recessions?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Jue Insights: Beyond Racial Attitudes: The Role of Outside Options in the Dynamics of White Flight

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Beyond Racial Attitudes: The Role of Outside Options in the Dynamics of White Flight

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Tearing the Paper Ceiling: The Impact of State Commitments to Remove Degree Requirements on Public Awareness and Job Opportunities for Stars

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Tearing the Paper Ceiling: The Impact of State Commitments to Remove Degree Requirements on Public Awareness and Job Opportunities for STARs

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-12-01

  reportOpen access

  In the past two years, 25 states have enacted executive orders and legislation to reduce unnecessary degree requirements for public sector jobs, signaling a shift toward skill-based hiring. This paper examines the impact of these policy commitments on public perceptions, media coverage, and job posting practices in the time following their adoption. Our analysis reveals significant increases in public awareness of skill-based hiring concepts, such as the 'paper ceiling' (i.e., bachelor’s degree analog of the glass ceiling), and a notable decline in bachelor’s degree requirements in state government job postings. We estimate that degree requirements dropped by 2.5 percentage points for each additional year of policy exposure in states with commitments. These findings suggest that state policy commitments have expanded access to government jobs for workers skilled through alternative routes (STARs) other than the bachelor’s degree in keeping with the intended goals of the policies to broaden the talent pool for public sector hiring.

  PublisherDOI

• Skills Degrees and Labor Market Inequality

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Bobby Chung

  West Virginia University

  45 shared

• Papia Debroy

  6 shared

• Justin Heck

  5 shared

• Kent Smetters

  University of Pennsylvania

  4 shared

• Patrick Bayer

  4 shared

• David Deming

  Harvard University

  4 shared

• Kenneth Whaley

  2 shared

• Martin Thuo

  North Carolina State University

  2 shared

Labs

• Project on WorkforcePI