David Figlio
Orrington Lunt Professor of Education and Social Policy and of Economics (by courtesy) | Dean of the School of Education and Social Policy
PhD, Economics, University of Wisconsin, 1995
IPR education economist David Figlio conducts research on a wide range of education and health policy issues from school accountability and standards to welfare policy and policy design. His current research projects involve studying the interrelationship between health and education, the ways in which parents confer advantage and disadvantage to their children, and the role of educational institutions in affecting these relationships; higher education policies and practices such as online education and educational staffing; K-12 education policies such as school accountability, school choice, and teacher tenure; and early childhood health and education policies such as early interventions for autism spectrum disorders. He also recently led a National Science Foundation-sponsored national network to facilitate the use of matched administrative datasets to inform and evaluate education policy.
Figlio's work has been published in numerous leading journals, including the American Economic Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, JAMA Pediatrics, Review of Economics and Statistics, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and Journal of Human Resources. Organizations supporting his research include the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Education, and Health and Human Services, as well as the Annie E. Casey, Doris Duke Charitable Trust, Gates, Laura and John Arnold, MacArthur, Smith Richardson, and Spencer foundations, among others.
Figlio is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the executive board of the National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. He served as the inaugural editor of the Association for Education Finance and Policy's journal, Education Finance and Policy (MIT Press), and currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Human Resources. He has been part of many national education task forces and panels, such as the Institute of Medicine's panel on the Science of Child Development from Birth through Age Eight, and advised several U.S. states and foreign nations on the design, implementation, and evaluation of educational policies. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education.
Figlio joined Northwestern in 2008 from the University of Florida, where he was the Knight-Ridder Professor of Economics.