Caroline Hoxby

Professor Caroline Hoxby is the Scott and Donya Bommer Professor of Economics at Stanford University, the Director of the Economics of Education Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Trained as a public finance and labor economist, Professor Hoxby is one of the world's leading scholars in the Economics of Education. Her pioneering work in the field was transformative because she saw that applying economic thinking to education generates many important insights.

Professor Hoxby’s recent Expanding College project addressed the issue that low-income high achievers usually fail to apply to any selective college for their post-secondary education despite the fact that they are extremely likely to be admitted and receive generous financial aid from the institutions (often times making the selective schools less costly than the non-selective schools). After a randomized controlled trial found that low-income high achievers are almost 80 percent more likely to gain admission to a selective school when they have rich instructional resources, the issue is now being addressed systematically. Hoxby received The Smithsonian Institution's Ingenuity Award for this project, and Smithsonian Magazine heralded the product of the research as “the crowning achievement of her two decades as the country’s leading educational economist.”

Additionally, Hoxby has been a presidential appointee to the National Board of Education Sciences and serves on advisory committees for the government , The Brookings Institution and organizations with an interest in education policy. She has delivered keynote, plenary, and endowed lectures at institutions such as UC Berkley, Notre Dame University and the Econometric Society, among many others.

Hoxby has a Ph.D. from MIT, studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and obtained her baccalaureate degree summa cum laude from Harvard University.