Dinner & Fireside Chat with Peter Blair & Gerald Chertavian

Peter Blair is an economist whose work asks what we actually mean when we call someone skilled. He is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and principal investigator of the Blair Economics Lab.

His central work inverts how economists usually treat occupational licensure. Rather than seeing it only as a barrier to entry, he asks what a license shares with a college degree — coursework, testing, and a signal employers trust — and has shown that in licensed occupations the wage gap between Black and white men effectively disappears. Newer work finds that where an occupation requires a license, job postings have fallen far less under generative AI than where it does not — labor-market regulation as an unexpected brake on displacement.

He grew up in the Bahamas, the youngest of seven brothers, selling fruit and vegetables with his family. Three of his brothers went to college; three did not. He is himself a community college graduate, which shaped how he sees education. He holds a PhD from Wharton, an M.Sc. in theoretical physics from Harvard, and a B.Sc. from Duke.

Gerald Chertavian founded Year Up in 2000 and led it for twenty-five years, building it into one of the largest and most rigorously studied workforce programs for young adults in the country.

Less familiar is where his attention has gone since. He teaches at Harvard Business School, where his work centers on systems change — what philanthropy can move beyond funding individual programs. He serves on the board of The Boston Foundation and chairs its new campaign, one pillar of which is meaningful careers. The Foundation granted roughly $300 million into Boston last year and raised half a billion, making it the largest grantmaker in the Commonwealth.

He also chaired Roxbury Community College for six years, and through the Boston Foundation has studied the vocational ESOL landscape across greater Boston — the model behind this afternoon's visit to JVS Boston.