Welcoming Lisa Lynch as the 2025-2026 Stone Visiting Scholar

Harvard Kennedy School's Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy has appointed economist Lisa Lynch as the 2025-2026 Stone Visiting Scholar and Visiting Professor of Public Policy. She is the Stone Program's fourth Stone Visiting Scholar, following the previous appointments of economists David Weil (2024-2025), Lucas Chancel (2023-2024), and David Autor (2021-2022).

Lisa M. Lynch is the Maurice B. Hexter Professor of Social and Economic Policy at Brandeis University's Heller School for Social Policy and Management, where she was also the director of the Institute for Economic and Racial Equity, and is co-director of the Retirement and Disability Research Center at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. She served as Brandeis University's Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs from 2014-15 and 2016-2020, Interim President of Brandeis University from 2015 to 2016, and Dean of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management from 2008 to 2014. A past president of the Labor and Employment Relations Association, Lynch is currently an elected member of the executive committee of the American Economic Association. She is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at IZA (Institute for Labor Economics, Germany), as well as a trustee/board director of Regis College, Core Economics Education, and the Economic Policy Institute. 

Lynch has extensive public policy experience, having served as the chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor (1995-1997); director (2004-2009), chair (2007-2009) of the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston; and chair of the Conference of Chairmen of the Federal Reserve System (2009). In addition, she served on the Economic Advisory Panel of the New York Federal Reserve Bank (2019-2024), the Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (2008-2015), the National Academies Committee on National Statistics (2009-2015). She has published extensively on the impact of technological change, organizational innovation (especially training), and unionization on productivity and wages, the determinants of youth unemployment, and the school-to-work transition, among other issues. She has been a faculty member at Tufts University, MIT, the Ohio State University, and the University of Bristol. 

Lynch received her BA in economics and political science at Wellesley College, and her MSc. and Ph.D. in economics at the London School of Economics.