Candace Howes

Candace Howes is working on the problems of the long-term-care workforce and low wage workers. She previously taught at the University of Notre Dame and served as the auto industry analyst for the United Auto Workers in Detroit. She also provides research assistance and expert testimony for the advocacy groups that support long term care workers and consumers.

Howes was honored as the recipient of the College's 2011 Helen Brooks Regan Faculty Leadership Award, presented annually to a tenured faculty member whose outstanding service in a leadership role exemplifies the College's commitment to shared governance, democratic process and campus community development. 

In summer 2011 she was awarded a two year $157,000 grant by the Russell Sage Foundation (in collaboration with scholars at the University of Pittsburgh) to study the effect of job quality on the quality of care provided in institutional and home-based long-term-care settings. In 2005 she was awarded a $500,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies as part of the Better Jobs Better Care initiative, which took her to California to study how low wages and benefits contribute to the shortage of home care providers. Her recent work has been published in the Gerontologist, Industrial Relations and State of California Labor. She has three chapters in a book, titled For Love and Money: Carework in the United States (Russell Sage Foundation, 2012.)

Her earlier work was focused on the impact of declining competitiveness on U.S. manufacturing workers. She is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters and has published a monograph through the Economic Policy Institute titled "Japanese auto transplants and the U.S. automobile industry," concerning the impact of Japanese investment on U.S. employment. Her book, Competitiveness Matters: Industry and Economic Performance in the U.S., was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2000.

Professor Howes received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and her B.A. in Middle East Languages and Literature from Barnard College. 

She is a member of the American Economics Association, the Labor and Employment Relations Association, the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession and the International Association for Feminist Economics.

View the economics department website.

Majoring in Economics.