Scott Davis

Scott Davis is a principal economist at AIR. He is a labor economist with over 16 years of experience designing and implementing research and evaluation projects for a variety of clients, including the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), the U.S. Department of Education (ED), state and local workforce agencies, community colleges, and private sector clients. Dr. Davis is an expert in evaluation design and quantitative methods, with experience developing and successfully implementing rigorous evaluation designs tailored to the operational contexts of workforce programs—including experimental studies, quasi-experimental studies, and implementation studies.

Dr. Davis is an experienced leader of research and evaluation studies, having served in project and task leadership roles on a wide range of studies. He is the project director for AIR’s National Evaluation of Career and Technical Education under Perkins V (NECTEP) study, a multi-year evaluation for ED’s Institute of Education Sciences. He has also served for four years as a trainer for the Career and Technical Education Research Network’s summer research training institute. In that role he developed and delivered two days of methods-focused training that covered both regression discontinuity designs and comparative interrupted time series designs.

Dr. Davis has led and contributed to more than twenty-five research and evaluation studies focused on workforce topics, including career and technical education, reemployment programs, unemployment insurance, occupational training, apprenticeship, veterans programs, worker protection programs, self-employment, and more. He currently oversees data collection for experimental evaluations in two states that are both designed to test the effectiveness of state reemployment programs. For a project funded by DOL’s Chief Evaluation Office (CEO), he is currently leading an evaluability assessment to judge the potential for an impact evaluation of a program aimed to help military service members transition to the civilian labor force after their separation from the military. For another project funded by DOL CEO he recently led and contributed to two experimental evaluations of interventions that applied behavioral science to improve workforce programs: one aimed at increasing compliance with unemployment insurance work search requirements and another aimed at increasing engagement with a youth workforce program in Ohio. In the past, Dr. Davis developed and implemented third-party evaluations of three separate efforts funded by DOL’s Workforce Innovation Fund and its Trade Adjustment Assistance and Community College Career Training grants, and he led two studies for DOL’s Employment and Training Administration on state and national efforts to develop education and training program scorecards.

During his career, Dr. Davis has collaborated closely with partners from federal agencies at DOL and ED; from the state workforce agencies in Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin; from local workforce boards in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; from a consortium of three community colleges in Pennsylvania; and from other public and private organizations. He regularly prepares reports, presentations, and other deliverables for both clients and a variety of external audiences.