Ian M. Schmutte

I am a Principal Economist with People eXperience & Technology (PXTCS) at Amazon. Our team builds models and mechanisms to help address some of the most challening issues facing Amazon’s corporate workforce. We work with customers to deliver science-driven guidance at scale, using a combination of economic theory, causal inference, structural modeling and machine learning tailored to the specific problem.

Prior to joining Amazon in March 2023, I was a Professor of Economics in the John Munro Godfrey Sr. Department of Economics in the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, where I still hold the position of Adjunct Professor. My academic research focuses on the econometric analysis of labor markets using linked employer-employee data and data privacy. As a labor economist, I focus on how regulations and social institutions affect earnings and job mobility. I have studied job referral networks, compensating differentials, racial discrimination, the gender wage gap, and the effects of minimum wages on turnover. In the realm of data privacy, I focus primarily on the implications of data protections on statistical inference and modeling trade-off between privacy and accuracy in the publication of official statistics.

I am a Fellow of the Global Labor Organization, and a Research Fellow with the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA). Between 2017 and 2023 I also worked as a research economist with the Center for Enterprise Dissemination - Disclosure Avoidance at the U.S. Census Bureau helping lead reseaarch to develop practical data privacy models for business data.