Hilary Hoynes is an economist and Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at the

University of California at Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant univ ...

. She studies the impact of

tax A tax is a compulsory financial charge or some other type of levy imposed on a taxpayer (an individual or legal entity) by a governmental organization in order to fund government spending and various public expenditures (regional, local, or n ...

and transfer programs on low-income families, particularly

single parent A single parent is a person who has a child or children but does not have a spouse or live-in partner to assist in the upbringing or support of the child. Reasons for becoming a single parent include divorce, break-up, abandonment, becoming wid ...

families. She was the 2014 winner of the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. She has been a co-editor of the

American Economic Review The ''American Economic Review'' is a monthly peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Economic Association. First published in 1911, it is considered one of the most prestigious and highly distinguished journals in the field of ec ...

, co-editor of American Economic Journal:Economic Policy, Associate editor of Journal of Public Economics and Journal of Economic Perspectives. In 2023, she was elected to the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

Research

Her research has covered every major government anti-poverty program in the United States, including The

Earned Income Tax Credit The United States federal earned income tax credit or earned income credit (EITC or EIC) is a refundable tax credit for low- to moderate-income working individuals and couples, particularly those with children. The amount of EITC benefit depends ...

Food Stamps In the United States, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the Food Stamp Program, is a federal program that provides food-purchasing assistance for low- and no-income people. It is a federal aid program, ad ...

, and

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF ) is a federal assistance program of the United States. It began on July 1, 1997, and succeeded the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, providing cash assistance to indigent Ame ...

, and has examined outcomes such as

labor supply In mainstream economic theories, the labour supply is the total hours (adjusted for intensity of effort) that workers wish to work at a given real wage rate. It is frequently represented graphically by a labour supply curve, which shows hypotheti ...

, employment, marriage, divorce,

infant An infant or baby is the very young offspring of human beings. ''Infant'' (from the Latin word ''infans'', meaning 'unable to speak' or 'speechless') is a formal or specialised synonym for the common term ''baby''. The terms may also be used to ...

health, and education. She has found that people who lived in counties that adopted the

Food Stamp In the United States, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the Food Stamp Program, is a federal program that provides food-purchasing assistance for Poverty in the United States, low- and no-income people. It ...

program before their third birthday had better health later in life. Hoynes and her co-authors Almond and Schanzenbach were the first to contribute to the idea that FSP improves birth weights. They saw that the group receiving the FSP(treated) reduced the low birth weight by 7% for whites and between 5% and 11% for blacks. The authors do mention that not all treatment effects are statically significant; still they point to improvements in birth weights following the introduction of the Food Stamp Program. In her research with Almond and Schanzenbach they also explain that recipients of the FSP who are infra-marginal see in-kind transfers, like FSP, as an equivalent to cash; with this the authors expect an increase in both food consumption and normal goods. The

does much more to encourage parents' work and to reduce poverty among children at a lower cost to the federal budget than the

Child Tax Credit A child tax credit (CTC) is a tax credit for parents with dependent children given by various countries. The credit is often linked to the number of dependent children a taxpayer has and sometimes the taxpayer's income level. For example, in t ...

and that Head Start. Preschool programs have longer-lasting impacts for children who do not speak English at home, Hoynes describes the EITC as the "cornerstone of U.S anti-poverty policy". Hoynes and Ankur J. Patel found that the 1993 expansion of the EITC increased employment for single mothers with less than a college degree by 6.1 percentage points. She suggests that there is growing evidence that the EITC improves children's cognitive outcomes and educational achievement from elementary school through college. Since the

Great Recession The Great Recession was a period of marked general decline, i.e. a recession, observed in national economies globally that occurred from late 2007 into 2009. The scale and timing of the recession varied from country to country (see map). At ...

, Hoynes' research has focused on the performance of anti-poverty programs in recessions. Hoynes has research affiliations at the

National Bureau of Economic Research The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is an American private nonprofit research organization "committed to undertaking and disseminating unbiased economic research among public policymakers, business professionals, and the academic c ...

, the University of California, Davis Center for Poverty Research and the

Institute for Fiscal Studies The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) is an economic research institute based in London, United Kingdom, which specialises in UK taxation and public policy. It produces both academic and policy-related findings. The institute's aim is to "a ...

. She serves on the National Advisory Committee of the

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) is an American philanthropic organization. It is the largest one focused solely on health. Based in Princeton, New Jersey, the foundation focuses on access to health care, public health, health equity, ...

Scholars in Health Policy Research Program and the Advisory Committee for the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

's Directorate for the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences. In 2016 Hoynes was appointed as a member of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking.

Selected works

* Eissa, Nada, and Hilary Williamson Hoynes. "Taxes and the labor market participation of married couples: the earned income tax credit." Journal of Public Economics 88.9-10 (2004): 1931-1958. * Hoynes, Hilary. Welfare transfers in two-parent families: labor supply and welfare participation under AFDC-UP. No. w4407. National Bureau of Economic Research, 1993. * Eissa, Nada, and Hilary W. Hoynes. "Behavioral responses to taxes: Lessons from the EITC and labor supply." Tax Policy and the Economy 20 (2006): 73-110. * Bitler, Marianne P., Jonah B. Gelbach, and Hilary W. Hoynes. "What mean impacts miss: Distributional effects of welfare reform experiments." American Economic Review 96.4 (2006): 988-1012. * Hoynes, Hilary, Douglas L. Miller, and Jessamyn Schaller. "Who suffers during recessions?." Journal of Economic Perspectives 26.3 (2012): 27-48.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hoynes, Hilary American women economists 20th-century American economists 21st-century American economists Goldman School of Public Policy faculty University of California, Davis faculty Stanford University alumni Colby College alumni Living people 1961 births Labor economists 20th-century American women 21st-century American women Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences