ADP Research

Nela Richardson is chief economist and ESG officer for ADP Inc. She also leads the independent team at ADP Research, which provides reliable and timely data-driven discovery for use by the public, business leaders, and policymakers. 

In 2021, Nela led a revamp of the ADP National Employment Report in collaboration with Stanford Digital Economy Lab and led the launch of Pay Insights, a report that tracks wage growth based on the payroll data of almost 10 million individual workers. 

In addition to ongoing labor market analysis, Nela is a highly sought-after speaker. She has delivered remarks at the World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Switzerland, and the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole Economic Symposium. 

She is a contributor to Bloomberg and American Public Media's marketplace. She appears frequently on CNBC, Fox Business, CNN, Yahoo! Finance, and in The Wall Street Journal, FORTUNE magazine, and The New York Times. Her weekly column, Main Street Macro, examines economic conditions and their effect on small and large businesses, workers, and households. 

Prior to joining ADP, Nela was a principal and investment strategist at Edward Jones Investments, where she analyzed and interpreted economic trends and financial market conditions and recommended investment strategies. She previously served as chief economist at Redfin Corp., a national real estate brokerage and technology company, where she led a team of data scientists, economists, and writers who tracked trends in the housing market. At Bloomberg, L.P., she was a senior economist covering housing and financial markets. 

Nela has held research positions at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, and Freddie Mac. She held an adjunct finance professorship at the Carey School of Business at John Hopkins University.  

She was awarded a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park, with concentrations in financial economics, international finance, and economic development. She earned her master’s degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s degree from Indiana University in Bloomington with a triple major in mathematics, economics, and philosophy. 

Nela is a member of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab Advisory Group, the National Academies Committee on National Statistics, the World Economic Forum Global Futures Council, and the U.S. Monetary Policy Forum.