Jesse Rothstein

Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy and Economics
Faculty Director, California Policy Lab

Jesse Rothstein is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, with appointments in the department of economics and the Goldman School of Public Policy. He is also the co-founder and co-director, with Till von Wachter (UCLA), of the California Policy Lab. He previously served as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor and as senior economist with the Council of Economic Advisers. From 2015–2020, he served as director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) at UC Berkeley.

Rothstein’s research examines education policy, tax and transfer policy, and the labor market. His recent work includes studies of teacher quality, school finance, intergenerational economic mobility, take-up of safety net benefits, and the labor market during the Great Recession. 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.

He is a member of the editorial boards of the American Economic Review, Industrial Relations, The Review of Economics and Statistics, and Education Finance and Policy. 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. Rothstein received an M.P.P. and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and an A.B. from Harvard.