Jesse Rothstein

Jesse Rothstein holds the Carmel P. Friesen Chair in Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also professor of economics. He is the co-director of the California Policy Lab, which he co-founded (with Till von Wachter) in 2017, and a nonresident scholar at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

He previously served as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor and as senior economist with the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

From 2015 to 2020, he served as director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UC Berkeley. Rothstein’s research examines education policy, tax and transfer policy, and the labor market. His recent work includes studies of school finance, intergenerational economic mobility, take-up of safety net benefits, and regional and industry wage differentials.

His work has been published in leading journals in economics, public policy, education, and law. He has served as an expert witness in several cases regarding teacher evaluation and school finance.

Rothstein is a member of the editorial boards of Industrial Relations, the Review of Economics and Statistics, Education Finance and Policy, and the National Education Policy Center, and of the executive board of the Society of Labor Economists.

He was named the John T. Dunlop Outstanding Scholar by the Labor and Employment Relations Association in 2011. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a fellow of the National Education Policy Center, the CESifo Research Network, the IZA, and the Learning Policy Institute.

He received a Ph.D. in economics and a Master of Public Policy, both from the University of California, Berkeley, and an A.B. from Harvard University.