Hilary Hoynes

Hilary Hoynes is the Chancellor’s Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of California Berkeley where she directs the Berkeley Opportunity Lab and co-directs the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality. She is an economist who works on poverty, inequality, and the social safety net. Her current research examines how access to the social safety net in early life affects children’s later life health and human capital outcomes.

She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Social Insurance, and is a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists. She has served as co-editor of the American Economic Review and the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and is on the editorial board of the American Economic Review: Insights.

Hoynes previously served on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Building an Agenda to Reduce the Number of Children in Poverty by Half in 10 Years, the American Economic Association’s Executive Committee, and the State of California Task Force on Lifting Children and Families out of Poverty. She also is a former member of the Federal Commission on Evidence-Based Policy Making; the Advisory Committee for the National Science Foundation; the Directorate for the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences; and the National Advisory Committee of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program. In 2014 she received the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the Committee on the Status of the Economics Profession of the American Economic Association.

Her research focuses on poverty, inequality, food and nutrition programs, and the impacts of government tax and transfer programs on low income families. Current projects include evaluating the effects of access to the social safety net in early life on later health and human capital outcomes, examining the effects of the Great Recession on poverty, and evaluating the role of the safety net in mitigating income losses.

Hoynes received her Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 1992 and her undergraduate degree in economics and mathematics from Colby College in 1983.