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American Economics Association

American Law and Economics Association 

The Status of Women in the Economics Profession

Society of Economics of the Household

Society of Labor Economists

Southern Economic Association.

Efficient Deterrence of Workplace Sexual Harassment

The Gendered Burdens of Conviction and Collateral Consequences on Employment

Division of Marital Assets in High Asset Divorces

"Women have made huge advances relative to men in the labor force, occupational status, and educational attainment, but women continue to earn less than men. While the gender pay gap has narrowed, a substantial gap remains. Sex Discrimination in the Labor Market examines sources of this pay disparity and the factors that contribute to this gap..."

Sex Discrimination in the Labor Market

Joni Hersch is an economist who works in the areas of employment discrimination and empirical law and economics. She has published numerous articles in leading peer-reviewed journals and law reviews. 

Hersch’s research focuses on the influence of gender, race, national origin, skin color, and family background on labor market outcomes, higher education and inequality. Her research has received international media attention and has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Vox, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic and the L.A. Times.

Hersch joined Vanderbilt Law School as a professor of law and economics in 2006, with secondary appointments in the Department of Economics and the Owen Graduate School of Management. That same year, she and W. Kip Viscusi co-founded Vanderbilt’s Ph.D. Program in Law and Economics. She is a research fellow with IZA Institute for Labor Economics and was co-editor of the peer-reviewed IZA Journal of Labor Economics from summer 2015 through summer 2018. She also serves as associate editor of the Review of Economics of the Household. She is the author of Sex Discrimination in the Labor Market (Foundations and Trends in Microeconomics, 2006) and co-editor of Emerging Labor Market Institutions for the Twenty-First Century (University of Chicago, 2004).

Before joining Vanderbilt’s faculty, Hersch was an adjunct law professor at Harvard Law School. She was a professor of economics at the University of Wyoming from 1989 to 1999 and has been a visiting professor of economics at Northwestern, Caltech, Duke, and Harvard.

Employment Law

Employment & Labour Law

Sex Discrimination

Labor Economics

Employment Discrimination

Discrimination in the Labor Markets

Employment and Labor Law

Faculty Page

Vanderbilt University News Profile

The impending ripple effect of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ban

What the SCOTUS ruling on affirmative action could mean for your HR team and talent pipeline

Pay attention to potential charter school expansion in Tennessee | Opinion

Double Majors in College: What to Know

Tackling sexual harassment could bring sizeable economic dividends

How to keep leadership white: Ban affirmative action

Are Abortion Rights Just for Privileged Careerists?

Latinos with darker skin say they face discrimination and trouble getting ahead — another impact of colorism

Why Big Law Has a Stake in the Harvard Admissions Case

Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair Professor of Law and Economics; Co-Director, Ph.D. Program in Law and Economics

Media Inquiry