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Sherwin Rosen Prize 2026 Recipient Issac Sorkin
Isaac Sorkin is one of the leading labor economists of his generation. His research has changed how economists think about firms, workers, and inequality in labor markets. Across a wide range of topics, he has combined theoretical insight, methodological innovation, and careful empirical work to answer fundamental questions about worker mobility, firm amenities, labor market power, and the long-run effects of policy. His most important contribution to date is “Ranking Firms Using Revealed Preference” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2018), a paper that has had a profound impact on labor economics. The paper addresses a central question in the field: how much of wage variation across firms reflects pay premia, and how much reflects nonwage amenities that workers value? Sorkin’s key insight is that worker preferences over firms can be recovered from worker mobility itself. Using employer-to-employer transitions in matched U.S. employer-employee data covering roughly 1.5 million firms, he constructs a firm-level ranking based on revealed preference, without relying on wage data or direct measures of amenities. He then develops a way to distinguish voluntary mobility from firm-driven separations, allowing the ranking to capture worker valuations rather than firm distress. The paper is both conceptually and methodologically groundbreaking. By drawing on tools from numerical linear algebra to summarize an enormous matrix of worker flows, Sorkin turns millions of mobility decisions into an empirical ranking of firms by worker desirability. The paper shows that compensating differentials account for more than half of the firm component of earnings dispersion, overturning the conventional view that firm pay differences largely reflect wage premia alone. It has reshaped how economists interpret firm wage effects, challenged standard readings of AKM decompositions, and opened an important new literature on firm valuation and worker preferences. Sorkin’s broader body of work underscores both the range and coherence of his contributions. In “Granular Search, Market Structure, and Wages” (Review of Economic Studies, 2024, with Gregor Jarosch and Jan Sebastian Nimczik), he develops a novel framework linking employer size, labor market concentration, and wage-setting, contributing to the modern literature on monopsony and labor market power. In his minimum wage research, including “Are There Long-Run Effects of the Minimum Wage?” (Review of Economic Dynamics, 2015) and “Industry Dynamics and the Minimum Wage: A Putty-Clay Approach” (International Economic Review, 2018, with Daniel Aaronson, Eric French, and Ted To), he shows that the effects of minimum wage policy unfold through long-run industry adjustment, entry, exit, and capital substitution, pushing the literature beyond a narrow focus on short-run reduced-form estimates, showing that, in general, distributed lag models do not identify long run effects. In “Bartik Instruments: What, When, Why, and How” (American Economic Review, 2020, with Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham and Henry Swift), he helped transform how applied economists understand one of the field’s most widely used empirical strategies, providing a clearer account of where identification comes from and when it is credible. Taken together, these papers show a scholar of exceptional originality, depth, and influence. Across questions of worker mobility, labor market power, policy, and empirical design, Isaac Sorkin’s work has repeatedly changed how economists think about core labor market questions. He has already produced a body of scholarship of extraordinary distinction and is exceptionally deserving of the Sherwin Rosen Prize. |
Isaac Sorkin is an Associate Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He received a B.A. from Swarthmore College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He is a recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.