William M. Rodgers III
Vice President, Community Development Research
William M. Rodgers III is vice president of Community Development Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Before joining the St. Louis Fed, he served as a professor of public policy at the Bloustein School for Planning and Public Policy and the chief economist at the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.
Rogers’ research interests and areas of expertise include economic mobility, compensation, labor markets and general economic trends. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and served as the academy’s board chair from 2016 to 2021. In 2024, the organization awarded Rodgers the Robert Ball Award for Outstanding Contributions in Social Insurance.
Previously, Rogers was a nonresident fellow at The Century Foundation and has served in many public capacities, including on former President Barack 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.
Other roles in which Rodgers has served include as treasurer of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a member of the U.S. board of United Way Worldwide, and a member of the board of trustees of McDaniel College. He was a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and chaired 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 EEOC.
Rodgers has published articles in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, The Review of Black Political Economy, International Migration, and Family Economics and Nutrition Review. He edited the book Handbook on the Economics of Discrimination, which was selected by Choice, the review journal of the American Library Association, as an Outstanding Academic Book of 2006.
Rodgers has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune magazine, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Financial Times, and many other publications. He has been a guest on numerous television and radio shows, including MSNBC, Yahoo Finance, CNBC and NPR’s Marketplace, Weekend Edition and America Amplified.