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Morris M. Kleiner was born in a displaced persons camp for mainly Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in Landsburg, Germany, following World War II. His parents, Joseph and Dora Kleiner, had survived Auschwitz/Birkenau, Dachau, and several other slave labor camps in Nazi-occupied nations. His parents were fortunate to later emigrate to the United States and were sent to Peoria, Illinois, with assistance from the Hebrew Aid Society. Kleiner grew up in a working-class neighborhood and attended and graduated from Peoria public schools. He later attended Bradley University and graduated with a degree in economics. Following service in the U.S. Army and National Guard, he enrolled in the master’s program in Labor and Industrial Relations at the University of Illinois; he also worked for the National Labor Relations Board in Peoria. He married Sally Mosow Kleiner, who was the major contributor to his academic and personal success. Taking many economics classes as part of the master’s degree program, he applied to and was accepted in the Illinois PhD program in economics that he completed at age 25 in 1974, under the supervision of professors Hugh Folk and Paul Hartman, who was the department chair.
Kleiner’s first academic appointment was at the University of Kansas as an assistant professor. There he was mentored by the students of former Labor Secretary and Secretary of State George P. Shultz, such as Joe Pichler and Charles Krider, who encouraged his work on the role of institutions in labor markets and issues in enhancing productivity. While on leave at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., he saw the importance of labor economics in helping policymakers think about issues in new ways. During a subsequent visiting position at Harvard University, he was able to work with Professor Richard B. Freeman, who he saw as the most insightful and imaginative labor economist. While there he was able to secure an affiliation with the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he continues to work, and it further encouraged his interest in the study of the employment relationship. In the later part of the 1980s, Kleiner attained a position at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School and the Industrial Relations Center, where he found a home at an institution that also valued economics, public policy, and labor studies. The work that has given Kleiner the most notoriety was on occupational regulation. The Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis funded research and conferences on occupational regulation. These studies ranged from studying the influence of licensing on dentists to the aggregate economic effects of occupational regulation with former U.S. Council of Economic Advisers head and Princeton Professor Alan Krueger. The work has allowed the issue to become one that has had resonance with the top officials in the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, as well as in the halls of Congress in a nonpartisan manner.
Kleiner’s research has been funded by numerous nonprofit foundations, the U.S. federal government, and international organizations to develop new data on occupational licensing statutes and regulations over time and across nations. The results of the research have been published in top tier professional and academic journals and in nine books. The policy-oriented research has been covered in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and many other highly visible outlets. In addition, he has been a guest on many top podcasts and radio and television interview programs. Further, he has given in-person testimony to both U.S. Senate and House committees on occupational regulation policy based on the research. In addition, the work has influenced federal executive branch policy on occupational regulation as well as state policies on occupational licensing. Kleiner has provided briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court on occupational licensing issues. Internationally, he has served as an adviser to the World Health Organization, European Union , World Bank, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Professor Kleiner has recently been selected as one of the Michael A. and Anita Paleologos Yagjian Visiting Fellows at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution for 2025. He continues his work with international organizations such as the OECD and WHO to develop new occupational regulation policies for member nations. In addition, he maintains his work as a visiting scholar in economics at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. In 2018 he was selected as a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association for outstanding contributions to the field of industrial relations and human resources.