Sebastian Steffen

Sebastian Steffen is a PhD candidate in Information Technologies at MIT Sloan and a research affiliate with the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy(IDE) as well as with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab (DEL). He is advised by Erik Brynjolfsson and John Horton.

Sebastian’s research focuses on the effects of IT and automation on labor and skill demands. In particular, in ongoing work with LinkedIn he studies career transitions and identifies stepping stone jobs. In other work he employs Natural Language Processing techniques on job postings to model how occupational skill demands are changing and how the future of work may look like.

Before beginning his studies at MIT, Sebastian worked as a research assistant with Susan Athey and Markus Mobius at Microsoft Research, New England on how news aggregators affect internet news consumption, among other projects. He received a B.A. in Economics from Princeton University.