Biography

Nathaniel Hendren is a Professor of Economics at MIT. He is the founder and co-director of Policy Impacts, an “organization dedicated to improving the quality of public decisions and evidence-based policies”. He is also the founder and co-director of Opportunity Insights, an “initiative dedicated to identifying barriers to” economic opportunity and developing scalable solutions that enable people in the United States to escape poverty and improve their quality of life. His academic work focuses on measuring and evaluating the “impact of public policies in terms of well-being, with the” goal of expanding economic opportunities. He received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2019 and a Sloan Fellowship in 2016. He is the lead co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics and Associate Editor of American Economic Review: Insights. In 2024, he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.