Melissa S. Kearney

Director, Aspen Economic Strategy Group

Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics, University of Maryland

MELISSA S. KEARNEY is the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. She is also director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group; a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of MDRC and on the Board of the Notre Dame Wilson-Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities. Kearney previously served as Director of the Hamilton Project at Brookings and as co-chair of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology J-PAL State and Local Innovation Initiative. Kearney’s research focuses on poverty, inequality, and social policy in the United States. Her work is published in leading academic journals and is frequently cited in the press. She is an editorial board member of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and the Journal of Economic Literature; she was previously co-editor of the Journal of Human Resources and a Senior Editor of the Future of Children. She is the author of The Two-Parent Privilege (University of Chicago Press, 2023.) Kearney teaches Public Economics at both the undergraduate and Ph.D. level at the University of Maryland. She holds a B.A. in Economics from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT.