Exploring Marianne Bertrand’s early insights and enduring influence

Before Marianne Bertrand became a Citation Laureate 2025, she helped reshape how economists understand racial discrimination in hiring. Her landmark field experiment with Sendhil Mullainathan — “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?” — revealed that identical résumés received 50% more callbacks when they carried white-sounding names instead of Black-sounding ones, offering some of the clearest measurable evidence of bias in the U.S. labor market. The study remains a touchstone across economics, sociology, public policy and business, cited widely for its clarity, methodological rigor and enduring relevance.

Yet the intellectual roots of this work reach back even earlier — to Dr. Bertrand’s Harvard dissertation, Essays in Empirical Labor Economics (1998), which is available today through ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. For students, librarians and researchers, this dissertation offers an opportunity to trace the development of the ideas that would come to define a remarkable career.

Who is Marianne Bertrand — and Why Her Recognition Matters

Marianne Bertrand is the Chris P. Dialynas Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Her research spans labor economics, corporate governance, political economy and development economics, and appears in leading journals including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, and Journal of Political Economy.

Over her career, she has earned major honors such as the Elaine Bennett Research Prize (2004) and the Rosen Prize for Outstanding Contributions to Labor Economics (2012), and she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.

In 2025, she was named a Citation Laureate — recognition reserved for researchers whose influential, highly cited contributions are considered “Nobel class.” Clarivate’s data-driven methodology has accurately predicted future Nobel Prize recipients for decades, with 89 Citation Laureates later awarded Nobel Prizes.

Bertrand’s selection reflects her sweeping impact on economics and public policy, especially in areas related to inequality, discrimination, and the cultural and psychological influences shaping economic behavior.

Dr. Bertrand’s Multifaceted Impact

While the “Emily and Greg” study is her most publicly recognized work, Dr. Bertrand’s influence spans a wide array of economic questions:

• • Labor markets and inequality: Her research quantifies the mechanisms behind racial and gender disparities in hiring, job mobility and wages — shaping both academic conversations and policy debates.
  • Corporate governance and firm behavior: Dr. Bertrand has investigated how CEOs shape organizational performance, how corporate governance structures influence outcomes, and how managerial preferences affect firm behavior.
  • Culture, psychology and economic decisions: Her work integrates insights from psychology and culture into economic analysis, broadening the discipline’s understanding of why individuals and organizations behave as they do.

Across these areas, the themes visible in her dissertation — empirical rigor, curiosity about inequality, and attention to real world outcomes — echo throughout her career.

Why Access to Researchers’ Early Work Matters

For researchers at every level, early scholarship offers value that goes beyond historical interest:

• • Revealing the evolution of ideas: Seeing how a Nobel-class researcher approached questions before they achieved prominence in their field helps students understand the nonlinear nature of discovery.
  • Surfacing otherwise unpublished insights: Graduate work may never be revised into journal articles, yet it contains detailed methods, data discussions, and problem-solving approaches that can be invaluable.
  • Supporting advanced research teaching: Faculty can guide students from a dissertation to its later published versions to explore methodological development, writing progression and real-world application.

For Academic Librarians and Faculty: Turning Inspiration Into Access

Librarians play a crucial role in helping students connect big ideas to actionable research. Ways to integrate Bertrand’s early work include:

• • Embedding content from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global in course guides and capstone workflows for labor economics, public policy, management or sociology research.
  • Teaching “idea evolution” by pairing dissertation sections with later peer reviewed articles and encouraging students to compare methods and findings.
  • Using Web of Science integration to show how dissertations connect to broader bodies of knowledge – such as preprints, conference papers and journals – via citations and related records.

An Invitation to Explore

Marianne Bertrand’s recognition as a Citation Laureate 2025 highlights decades of rigorous, influential and socially meaningful research. But her journey began earlier — in a dissertation whose questions and methods still resonate today.

Through ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global, those beginnings remain accessible to every student or researcher ready to ask a bold question and follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Explore the dissertations and theses that launched today’s most influential scholars — including Marianne Bertrand — in ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.