About

Caroline Hoxby is the Scott and Donya Bommer Professor of Economics at Stanford University, a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, and the Director of the Economics of Education Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She specializes in public economics, the economics of education, and labor economics. Hoxby is recognized as one of the world's leading scholars in the Economics of Education and is known for promoting scientific methods in education research. Her work includes leading projects such as the Expanding College Opportunities initiative, which significantly impacted college attendance among low-income, high-achieving students, earning her the Smithsonian Institution's Ingenuity Award. Her research addresses key issues such as the rising costs of higher education, the effects of school choice and charter schools on student achievement, and the influence of teacher unionization. She also explores topics related to public school finance, peer effects, and the broader impact of education on economic growth. Hoxby has held academic appointments at Harvard University and Stanford University, and she has been actively involved in various professional organizations, serving as Vice-President of the American Economic Association and the Western Economic Association International. She is a fellow of several prestigious academies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, and the American Academy of Sciences and Letters. Her educational background includes a Ph.D. from MIT, studies at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and a summa cum laude bachelor's degree from Harvard University.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Medicine
• Developmental psychology

Selected publications

• Comments and Discussion

  Brookings Papers on Economic Activity · 2023-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Advanced Cognitive Skill Deserts in the United States: Their Likely Causes and Implications

  Brookings Papers on Economic Activity · 2021 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Developmental psychology
  • Cognitive psychology

  I use mapping and age trajectories of advanced cognitive skills to better understand why these skills are more prevalent in some local areas than in others. The study begins by explaining what advanced cognitive skills are. It offers a nonspecialist’s review of recent brain science that indicates that adolescence is the key period for the development of advanced cognitive skills. The paper considers three main explanations for why the prevalence of advanced cognitive skills varies substantially across US counties. Is it early childhood factors which could generate endogenous responses that are important later when advanced cognitive skills are developing? Is it factors whose influence is greatest during adolescence—the period when brain science argues that experience would most directly affect advanced cognitive skills? If so, adolescence is indeed the age of opportunity but also risk. Is the variation among counties explained by migration of individuals toward areas where other people have advanced cognitive skills similar to their own? Evidence based on cognitive skill trajectories, maps at different ages, and longitudinal regressions suggests that all three of these explanations play a role in generating areas where advanced cognitive skills are prevalent and areas where they are not—advanced cognitive skill deserts.

  PublisherDOI

• Productivity in Higher Education

  2019-01-01 · 37 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Productivity in Higher Education. National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report.

  2019-11-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Measuring Opportunity in U.S. Higher Education

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In identifying whether universities provide opportunities for low-income students, there is a measurement challenge: different institutions face students with different incomes and preparation. We show how a hypothetical university's “relevant pool”–the students from whom it could plausibly draw–affects popular measures: the Pell share, Bottom Quintile share, and Intergenerational Mobility. Using a proof by contradiction, we demonstrate that universities ranked highly on the popular measures can actually serve disproportionately few low-income students. We also show the reverse: universities slated for penalties on the popular measures can actually serve disproportionately many low-income students. Furthermore, the Intergenerational Mobility measure penalizes universities that face relatively equal income distributions, which are probably good for low-income students, and rewards universities that face very unequal income distributions. In short, by confounding differences in university effort with differences in circumstances, the popular measures could distort university decision making and produce unintended consequences. We demonstrate that, with well-thought-out data analysis, it is possible to create benchmarks that actually measure what they are intended to measure. In particular, we present a measure that overcomes the deficiencies of the popular measures and is informative about all, not just low-income, students.

  Publisher

• Introduction

  2019-01-01 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Productivity of U.S. Postsecondary Institutions

  2019-01-01 · 26 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Comments and Discussion

  Brookings Papers on Economic Activity · 2019-01-01

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Measuring Opportunity in U.S. Higher Education

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2019-01-01 · 10 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In identifying whether universities provide opportunities for low-income students, there is a measurement challenge: different institutions face students with different incomes and preparation. We show how a hypothetical university's "relevant pool"-the students from whom it could plausibly draw-affects popular measures: the Pell share, Bottom Quintile share, and Intergenerational Mobility. Using a proof by contradiction, we demonstrate that universities ranked highly on the popular measures can actually serve disproportionately few low-income students. We also show the reverse: universities slated for penalties on the popular measures can actually serve disproportionately many low-income students. Furthermore, the Intergenerational Mobility measure penalizes universities that face relatively equal income distributions, which are probably good for low-income students, and rewards universities that face very unequal income distributions. In short, by confounding differences in university effort with differences in circumstances, the popular measures could distort university decision making and produce unintended consequences. We demonstrate that, with well-thought-out data analysis, it is possible to create benchmarks that actually measure what they are intended to measure. In particular, we present a measure that overcomes the deficiencies of the popular measures and is informative about all, not just low-income, students.

  PublisherDOI

• The Right Way to Capture College "Opportunity": Popular Measures Can Paint the Wrong Picture of Low-Income Student Enrollment.

  Education next · 2019-01-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Sarah Turner

  University of Birmingham

  144 shared

• Mathias Dewatripont

  47 shared

• Philippe Aghion

  Collège de France

  47 shared

• Andreu Mas‐Colell

  46 shared

• André Sapir

  45 shared

• George Bulman

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  24 shared

• Christopher Avery

  17 shared

• Alberto Alesina

  Harvard University

  14 shared

Labs

• Hoxby LabPI

Education

• B.A.

  Harvard University

• Ph.D.

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Awards & honors

• The Smithsonian Institution's Ingenuity Award
• Phi Beta Kappa Prize for Excellence in Teaching, Phi Beta Ka…
• Thomas B. Fordham Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in Edu…
• Global Leader of Tomorrow, World Economic Forum (2002-2003)
• Carnegie Scholar, Carnegie Corporation of New York (2000)