Brad Hershbein is an Economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, an employment studies research organization in Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA. He completed his PhD in economics at the University of Michigan in 2012, and his AB, also in economics, from Harvard College in 2003. Prior to graduate school, he worked for three years at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston as a research associate.

His fields of interest focus on labor economics, economics of the family, and economics of education, and particularly how all three fields intersect at labor market entry. He has investigated how high school graduates fare in the labor market over the twenty years following graduating in a recession, how the availability of birth control allowed young women in the 1960s and 1970s to invest in their careers, and how employers use the selectivity of school and GPA to infer the productivity of new college graduates. His ongoing research examines job posting behavior of firms over the business cycle; the effect of the Kalamazoo Promise, a universal place-based scholarship, on college-going outcomes; and ways to improve the targeting of information on higher education costs to students.

He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in January 2014.