Bledi Taska

Oxford Martin Visiting Fellow

Bledi Taska is the Executive Vice President and Chief Economist at Lightcast. He is a labour economist specialising in the application of econometrics and data science methods on real-time labour market data. At Lightcast Bledi leads a team of economists and data scientists, which supports the company’s public policy research, product development, and collaboration with academic researchers and international organisations.

Current projects involve topics around skills mismatch and labour shortages, the future of skills, the effect of automation, and reskilling of workers based on skill adjacencies. Bledi has been invited to present at conferences organised by BLS, UNESCO, CEDEFOP, OECD, World Bank, ILO, IZA, and NESTA among others.

Bledi’s work at Lightcast has been published or featured in several popular media outlets from all over the world, such as the Australian Financial Review, the Daily Telegraph, the Economist, France 24, the Financial Times, The Guardian, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

Bledi holds a doctorate degree in economics from New York University with a concentration in labour and education economics and a master’s and bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Athens, Greece. His academic work has been published in leading academic journals, such as the American Economic Review, Research Policy, and Labour Economics.