John Horton

Graduate Student, Public Policy Program, Harvard Kennedy School

John is a PhD student in the Public Policy program at Harvard Kennedy School. His primary research field is labor economics. He is particularly interested in employer learning, the returns to education and skills, job search, the determinants of wages and the role of fairness and social preference factors in explaining labor market relationships. One of his areas of interest is the emergence of online labor markets and labor market intermediaries. In these markets, workers from around the world perform tasks amenable to remote completion (such as computer programming, graphic design, data entry, writing, consulting, and more) for paying customers. These markets are (a) useful for answering basic questions in economics and the social sciences and (b) potentially important phenomena in their own right. The markets themselves may serve as sources of high-quality observational data and be used for conducting field experiments.