Michelle Holder

Senior Fellow

As a Roosevelt senior fellow, Michelle Holder will have a research focus on Black workers and women of color in the American labor market.

Michelle Holder is an associate professor of economics at John Jay College, City University of New York, and was an Urban Institute One Million Black Women Research Partnership scholar in 2023. Her research focuses on Black workers and women of color in the American labor market. Michelle has testified before the US Congress as well as the City Council of New York on issues such as the gender wage gap, discrimination based on unemployment status, infrastructure investment, and Black men and employment. Michelle has also appeared on or been quoted in major media outlets including CNN, MSNBC, NPR, PBS, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, The Lily, the New York Amsterdam News, El Diario, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Economist, TheGrio, Politico, The Guardian, USA Today, The 19th, Marketplace, MarketWatch, Bloomberg, and Vox. Her first book, African American Men and the Labor Market during the Great Recession, was published in 2017 by Palgrave Macmillan, and her second book, Afro-Latinos in the US Economy, coauthored with Alan Aja, was published in 2021 by Lexington Books, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield.