Aaronson served as a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution until December 2022, where she held the position of vice president and director of economic studies.
Over her career, her research has been in the domain of macroeconomic activity, including monetary policy, inflation and labor force participation in the United States.
[citation needed] Most recently, Aaronson's work has contributed to the understanding of the current labor force participation rate in the United States and what has caused it to fluctuate.
Most notably, these include the increased portion of the population in older age groups, as they are more likely to have lower labor force participation rates.
Their most recent research has re-emphasized the importance of structural factors in explaining the long-run trend of declining labor force participation.
According to her findings, the decline in labor force participation is not primarily the result of the Great Recession, but rather structural changes in the economy are the main causal factor.
They note that neither of these effects have been offset by the rise in labor force participation among older workers due to improvements in health and longevity.
[12] Similarly, Aaronson's research has contributed to the understanding of how changes in the business cycle affect labor force participation among different groups of workers in the U.S. economy.
However, changes in the business cycle had a relatively greater effect on the labor force participation of disadvantaged groups, including Hispanics, African Americans and people with less than a college degree, compared to whites.
In addition, they found that the further expansion of an already strong economy still increased labor force participation among certain groups, particularly African American women with less than a college degree, and that these benefits held over time.
Aaronson and her colleagues looked at how fluctuations in the exchange rate affect workers likelihood of changing jobs or switching industries.
Their findings showed that the effect varies between employment sectors, and also depends on whether the movement in the exchange rate occurs on the import or export side.
[15] Aaronson and economist Andrew Figura investigated the consequences of inaccurate measurements of the number of hours worked over the business cycle on important macroeconomic phenomena, such as the markup of price over marginal cost and increasing returns to scale, as well as its implications for previously published research.
They argue that there is a significant discrepancy between these two measurements that may bias the results of existing research, in particular when accounting for the number of hours worked by salaried employees.