William M. Rodgers III is vice president and director of the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Before joining the Fed, Rodgers served as professor of public policy and chief economist at the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He also served as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta during 2021.
Rodgers is an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and served as its board chair for the last five years. He also serves as treasurer for the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Rodgers is a nonresident fellow at The Century Foundation and has served in many public capacities, including on President Obama’s Department of Labor transition team and as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor from 2000 to 2001. He served on the National Economic Association Board and is a past president. Rodgers also served on the U.S. Board of United Way Worldwide and currently works on the Board of Trustees of McDaniel College. He chairs the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s expert panel to evaluate the quality of compensation data collected from U.S. employers by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
His areas of expertise include compensation, pay equity, diversity and inclusion, labor market, and general economic trends. Rodgers has published articles in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, the Review of Black Political Economy, and Family Economics and Nutrition Review. His book, The Handbook on the Economics of Discrimination, was selected by Choice, the review journal of the American Library Association, as an Outstanding Academic Book for 2006.