White House Author

Alan B. Krueger is the former Chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and a member of the Cabinet. Mr. Krueger was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on November 3, 2011. Previously, Mr. Krueger served in the Obama Administration as Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

While he was Chairman, he was on leave from Princeton University, where he is the Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs. He has held a joint appointment in the Economics Department and the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton since 1987. In 1994-95, Mr. Krueger served as Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor.

A labor economist, Krueger has published widely on unemployment, the economics of education, unemployment, income distribution, social insurance, regulation, terrorism, finance and the environment. He has been a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the editorial board of Science, and has served as chief economist for the Council for Economic Education. He is the author of What Makes A Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism and Education Matters: A Selection of Essays on Education, and co-author of Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage and of Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies?

Prior to assuming his position as Chairman, Mr. Krueger was a member of the Board of Directors of the MacArthur Foundation and the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education at Charles University in the Czech Republic, and a senior scientist for the Gallup Organization. He was named a Sloan Fellow in Economics in 1992 and an NBER Olin Fellow in 1989-90. He was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1996, a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists in 2005 and a member of the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association in 2004. He was awarded the Kershaw Prize by the Association for Public Policy and Management in 1997 and the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal by the Indian Econometric Society in 2001. In 2002, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and in 2003 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He was awarded the IZA Prize in Labor Economics with David Card in 2006. From March 2000 to February 2009, he was a regular contributor to the "Economic Scene" and Economix blog in The New York Times.

Alan Krueger received a B.S. degree, with honors, from Cornell University’s School of Industrial & Labor Relations in 1983, an A.M. in Economics from Harvard University in 1985, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1987.