Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA)— A Hoover research fellow whose latest work explores how to improve job-training programs has won a worldwide award recognizing early-career scholars who generate impactful labor and employment research.
Styslinger Family Fellow Natalie Millar won an Early Career Research Award from the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research on March 30, 2026.
“It is an honor to be recognized for my research on customized job training. This award is especially meaningful to me because it comes from an institution with a long history of work that has shaped how economists think about business incentives and workforce development,” Millar said.
She continued, “The US federal, state, and local governments collectively spend $10 billion annually on customized job-training programs, yet we still know surprisingly little about their returns. These programs subsidize employer-designed and -delivered job training to align skill supply with skill demand, but an important open question is whether they generate new economic value or instead subsidize training that firms would have provided anyway.”
She said she will use the award to fund further research on the subject.
“I am grateful to the Tennessee agencies and leaders who have been willing to engage in transparent, evidence-based policymaking, especially Commissioner Deniece Thomas and her staff, the office of Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, and the Tennessee Office of Evidence and Impact,” Millar said. “I am also grateful for the support of the Styslinger Family and my colleagues at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University’s Department of Economics, and the Stanford Initiative for Business Taxation and Society.”
Her Tennessee-based study shows that employer-designed, publicly subsidized workplace and job-training programs generate significant benefits for workers and are an efficient use of public funding.
These findings may seem counterintuitive to beliefs that employers would retain most of the benefits from such training programs. Yet hand-collected data paired with rich administrative data shows that even employer-designed training programs produce broadly marketable industry- and occupation-level skills for workers, leading to a significant increase in earnings.
Millar’s estimates show that enrolling in a customized job-training program, typically lasting about four months, increases earnings by 3 percent per quarter over five years, comparable to the return from one additional year of work experience. Moreover, due to the low cost of such programs and the increased tax revenue from the workers’ earnings, Millar calculates that these programs more than pay for themselves.
Specifically, the research finds that workers earned an average of $1,624 in additional earnings each year after participating in customized job-training programming. The effect was substantially larger for workers in smaller businesses.
The award includes a cash prize and is given to ten early-career social scientists “who have earned a doctorate degree in the last six years and carry out policy-relevant research on labor market issues.”
Other recipients recognized this year were affiliated with universities such as Harvard, Yale, and the University of California, Berkeley. Their research covered issues ranging from the impact of affordable public transit on employment to the effect of workplace parental and sick-leave policies on subsequent employment and productivity.
This marks the second time Natalie Millar’s work has been recognized by the Upjohn Institute. In 2024, Hoover Fellow Valentin Bolotnyy received the Early Career Research Award for joint work with Millar and Senior Fellow Michael Lovenheim on the returns to prisoner education.
As part of the award, winners will write a research paper for the institute’s working paper series and produce a nontechnical summary for policy audiences.
Dr. Millar works as part of Hoover’s State and Local Governance Initiative and specializes in labor economics, public economics, and the economics of education. She is also a research fellow for the Alabama Commission on Higher Education and is affiliated with Stanford University’s Department of Economics, the Stanford Initiative for Business, Taxation, and Society at the Graduate School of Business, and Florida State University's Institute for Governance and Civics.
For coverage opportunities, contact Jeffrey Marschner, 202-760-3187, jmarsch@stanford.edu.
