On Rebecca Diamond’s first day on Wall Street in 2008, the quantitative hedge fund she worked for dropped in value by 40 percent. “Everyone was panicking,” recalls the inaugural Feldstein professor of economics, who joined the Harvard faculty in 2025. Her mother, father, and younger brother are all economics professors; Diamond wanted to first apply her formidable quantitative skills in the real world. But in the crucible of a financial meltdown, she learned that her true passion was research.
After earning a Harvard Ph.D. in economics, Diamond moved to Stanford, becoming an associate professor of economics at the business school. The most surprising work she co-authored there revealed a gender pay gap among Uber drivers. The project began with a question: absent discrimination by customers or the gender-blind algorithms that assign rides, why were women drivers earning 7 percent less than men? Most of the gap, she found, is attributable to time spent driving—experienced drivers earn about $3 more per hour, and men were able to spend more time working. Men are also more likely to drive in geographic areas with higher crime and more drinking establishments—and during times of day when dynamic rates yield higher pay. The study showed how difficult it is, Diamond says, to “decompose the gender pay gap.”
Today, Diamond’s principal research focus is the housing affordability crisis. She has modeled the links between policies such as zoning reform and increases in housing supply. A recent paper written with her new Harvard colleagues explores how “the revitalization of high-rise public housing projects in the early 1990s improved the economic opportunities for the kids [who] got to live there,” she says. And her ongoing research seeks to compare the patchwork of policies and programs addressing affordability across the country: what works best to make people’s lives better?
