Haig R. Nalbantian is a Senior Partner and a founder/leader of Mercer Workforce Sciences Institute. A labor /organizational economist, he has been instrumental in developing Mercer’s unique capability to measure the economic impact of human capital practices. Those capabilities have been applied in numerous projects he has directed for leading companies in the U.S. and abroad across a broad range of industries, including energy, high technology, manufacturing, consumer products, financial services, media and information services, telecommunications, and professional services. He has also consulted to organizations in the public and not-for-profit sectors. In recent years, Haig has worked extensively with high-profile organizations in the Middle East, with particular focus on strategic workforce planning, workforce strategies and metrics.
Haig came to Mercer from National Economic Research Associates, which he joined in 1989. Earlier, he was on the faculty of economics at New York University and was a research scientist at its C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics. He is an internationally recognized expert in incentives, human capital measurement and management and their links to organizational performance. He has published widely on these topics in books and articles in leading academic and professional journals, such as the American Economic Review, The Journal of Labor Economics, The Harvard Business Review, Compensation and Benefits Review, WorldatWork, among many others. His HBR article, “Making Mobility Matter,” received the Academy of Management’s 2010 award for “Outstanding Practitioner-oriented Publication” in 2009.
Nalbantian co-authored the prize-winning book on human capital measurement and management, Play to Your Strengths (McGraw Hill, 2004). He is also editor of and chief contributor to the book, Incentives, Cooperation and Risk Sharing and is a frequent speaker before industry groups, professional associations and academic audiences across the globe. He co-authored the newly released World Economic Forum/Mercer study of global talent mobility, “Talent Mobility Good Practices: Collaboration at the Core of Driving Economic Growth.”
Haig earned his BA in English and Economics at New York University and his graduate degrees in economics from Columbia University. He is a member of the American Economic
Association.