Research

A labor economist, Ghilarducci’s work focuses on the need to restore the promise of retirement for every American worker. Her research documents the many problems people now face in planning for retirement: decreasing coverage and contributions, increasing investment risk, portability, leakage, high fees, and the drawdown of benefits in retirement. This body of work led her to put forth a bold reform idea - the creation of Guaranteed Retirement Accounts (GRAs) – to provide a secure retirement to an additional 63 million people.

As the director of SCEPA, Ghilarducci leads the center in its work to focus the public economics debate on the role government can and should play in the real productive economy – that of business, management, and labor – to raise living standards, create economic security, and attain full employment. With the SCEPA team of faculty and research associates, she works from the broad and critical perspectives representative of The New School’s department of economics, including post-Keynesian, neo-classical, classical and institutionalist schools of thought.