David Autor studies what happens to workers when factories close and what AI might do to middle-class jobs. He does not study optimal monetary policy or general equilibrium theory. On July 1, 2026, he becomes head of the MIT economics department [4].
Autor has been at MIT since 1999, the year he finished his PhD in public policy, not economics, at Harvard's Kennedy School [4][6]. He now holds the Daniel and Gail Rubinfeld chair and co-directs two centers: the Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work, and the National Bureau of Economic Research Labor Studies Program [4]. His research portfolio is narrow and deep: trade shocks that gutted manufacturing towns, labor market polarization that hollowed out middle-skill jobs, and automation's uneven effects on wages.
Economics departments usually rotate leadership. A theorist hands off to an empiricist, a macro person to a trade specialist. MIT just picked the inequality scholar. That's a bet on which questions matter for the next decade, made visible in a personnel decision.
The credential path
Autor earned a BA in psychology from Tufts in 1989, then spent a decade before landing at Harvard for a doctorate [4][6]. The Kennedy School trains policy people, not academic economists. He arrived at MIT in 1999 and stayed. No Yale detour, no World Bank sabbatical, no Fed rotation. Twenty-seven years, one department.
The awards tell you where the profession thinks he fits. He won the Sherwin Rosen Prize for labor economics, a Carnegie Fellowship in 2019, and was named a NOMIS Distinguished Scientist in 2023 [4]. In 2024, the Schmidt Sciences Foundation picked him as an AI2050 Senior Fellow [4]. That last one is the tell: they fund people working on how artificial intelligence reshapes work and inequality, not people modeling optimal tax schedules.
What the appointment signals
Jon Gruber, who held the job since July 2023, is a health economist [4]. Before him, the department cycled through leaders with different specialties. Autor's appointment extends a pattern: MIT is staffing leadership with people whose work asks who wins and who loses, not just how to maximize aggregate output.
The China Shock research, Autor's most cited work, showed that trade with China between 1990 and 2007 cost the U.S. roughly 2.4 million manufacturing jobs, and those losses didn't disperse evenly across the labor market. They concentrated in specific towns and regions, which then saw rising disability claims, falling labor force participation, and political realignment [6]. The research became ammunition in trade wars because it documented a mechanism: markets don't automatically re-employ displaced workers, and the costs of adjustment fall on people who can't move and communities that can't diversify.
That's the scholar now running the department that trains the economists who staff the Fed, Treasury, and the World Bank. It's a choice about what kind of economics gets institutional weight.
Autor's term runs through at least 2029 [4]. By then, the questions he's spent 25 years asking will either be the profession's main work or a detour it tried and abandoned.
Right now, the bet is that they're the main work.
MIT just made that official.
