Hardy is a nonresident senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, a research fellow with the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and a research affiliate of both the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty and the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research. His research interests lie within labor economics, with an emphasis on economic instability, intergenerational mobility, poverty policy, racial economic inequality, and socio-economic outcomes.