Hilary Hoynes is a Professor of Economics and Public Policy and holds the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities at the University of California, Berkeley where she also co-directs the Berkeley Opportunity Lab. She is a member of the American Academy of Art and Sciences and 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 specializes in the study of 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 the access to the social safety net in early life on later life health and human capital outcomes, as well as examining the effects of the Great Recession on poverty and the role of the safety net in mitigating income losses.
Hoynes is a member of the American Economic Association’s Executive Committee, the Federal Commission on Evidence-Based Policy Making, and the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Building an Agenda to Reduce the Number of Children in Poverty by Half in 10 Years. In 2014 she received the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the Committee on the Status of the Economics Profession of the American Economic Association. Previously, she was a member of the Advisory Committee for the National Science Foundation, as well as 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. Hoynes received her PhD in Economics from Stanford in 1992 and her undergraduate degree in Economics and Mathematics from Colby College in 1983.
