Peter Kuhn

Peter Kuhn is a Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), affiliated with the Department of Economics within the College of Letters & Science. His research focuses on labor and personnel economics, with a particular emphasis on discrimination, online labor market matching, China’s labor markets, and turnover costs. He has been funded by the NSF, NIH, and Ford Foundation, among others.

He serves as a Co-Editor for the Journal of Labor Economics and holds editorial roles at AEJ: Applied, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, and Labour Economics. Kuhn is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and Center for Economic Studies (CES). His textbook, Personnel Economics, published by Oxford University Press, integrates classical and behavioral models to explore workplace dynamics.

Key research interests include analyzing gender and age discrimination in job advertisements, studying the effectiveness of online job platforms, and investigating employer preferences in China’s labor markets. His recent work examines policy impacts like the 2019 Chinese prohibition of gender-targeted job ads and evaluates the cost of employee turnover in retail sectors.

He collaborates with institutions such as the Australian National University and the University of Colorado, Denver, focusing on migrant workers, urban employment dynamics, and algorithmic bias in recruitment systems. His academic contributions span over three decades, with notable papers on labor supply, union impacts, and behavioral labor economics.

• Scientific Awards: None explicitly listed in the provided texts.

Advising and grants: Kuhn mentors graduate students like Lizi Yu and Kailing Shen. His grants include funding from NSF, NIH, and Ford Foundation for projects on labor market dynamics, personnel economics, and behavioral research. Teaching encompasses advanced undergraduate and PhD courses, including Personnel Economics and Labor Supply theories.

Labs/Teams: He collaborates through the Consortium for Applied Research in Economics and the German Cancer Consortium’s Clinical Communication Platform (DKTK), contributing to translational research in healthcare and oncology. His work also involves interdisciplinary teams in smart city data platforms and federated machine learning governance.