Dr. Nela Richardson is chief economist and ESG officer for ADP. She leads the team at ADP Research, an independent and reliable source of economic data tailored to global and local business leaders, policymakers, and the public. Her areas of expertise include finance, technology, housing, and labor.

In response to the accelerated pace of economic change, Richardson led a revamp of the ADP National Employment Report, a high-frequency indicator developed in collaboration with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. Richardson and her team of researchers, data scientists, and financial market experts deploy proprietary ADP data, including the anonymized payroll records of than 25 million employees and a monthly global survey that has reached more than half a million workers worldwide, to generate discoveries about the world of work.

In addition to the monthly National Employment Report, ADP research publishes Pay Insights, Data Lab, a repository for new findings, the quarterly journal Today at Work, and Main Street Macro, Richardson’s weekly take on global and national economic conditions and how they affect employers and their workers.

Richardson has delivered remarks at global thought-leadership events, including the World Economic Forum Annual Conference in Davos, Switzerland, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s annual Jackson Hole Economic Symposium. She is a regular contributor to top-tier media outlets, including Bloomberg and American Public Media’s Marketplace, and has appeared on CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fortune, CNN, and Yahoo! Finance, among others.

Prior to her work at ADP, Richardson was a principal and investment strategist at Edward Jones, a financial services company, where she interpreted economic trends and financial market conditions and recommended investment strategies. She previously served as chief economist at Redfin, a national real estate brokerage and technology company, where she led a team of data scientists, economists, and writers to track trends in the housing market. She also worked as a senior economist for Bloomberg covering housing and financial markets.

Richardson has held research positions at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, and Freddie Mac. She worked as an adjunct finance professor at the Carey School of Business at Johns Hopkins University. She earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park, with concentrations in financial economics, international finance, and economic development. She earned a master’s degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s degree from Indiana University in Bloomington, where she was a triple major in mathematics, economics, and philosophy.

Richardson serves on the Stanford Digital Economy Lab Advisory Group, the U.S. Monetary Policy Forum at the Chicago Booth School of Business, and the Committee on National Statistics and Committee on Automation and the U.S. Workforce, both at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. She is a member of the World Economic Forum Council on the Future of Job Creation and the Bureau of Economic Analysis Advisory Committee.