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Hilary Hoynes is Professor of Economics and Public Policy and holds the Haas Distinguished Chair of Economics Disparities. She also Directs the Berkeley Opportunity Lab. She is an economist who works on poverty, inequality, food and nutrition programs, and the impacts of government tax and transfer programs on low income families. Her current examines how access to the social safety net in early life affect’s children’s later life health and human capital outcomes.

Professor Hoynes is a member of the American Academy of Art and Sciences, the National Academy of Social Insurance, 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. She 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 State of California Task Force on Lifting Children and Families out of Poverty, and the Federal Commission on Evidence-Based Policy Making. She currently serves on California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Council of Economic Advisors. In 2014, she received the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the Committee on the Status of the Economics Profession of the American Economic Association.  Dr. Hoynes received her PhD in Economics from Stanford University in 1992 and her undergraduate degree in Economics and Mathematics from Colby College in 1983.

The high level of income inequality is one of the defining problems of our time and is the central theme of the research and policy work of the Economic Disparities Cluster. The work engages in real world policy solutions, which have historically been part of the problem. This also suggests that policies can be part of the solution.