David Deming

David Deming is the Academic Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School and the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy. He is also the Faculty Dean of Kirkland House at Harvard College and a Research Associate at NBER.

His research focuses on higher education, economic inequality, skills, technology, and the future of the labor market. He is a Principal Investigator, along with Raj Chetty and John Friedman, at the CLIMB Initiative, an organization that seeks to study and improve the role of higher education in social mobility. He is also a faculty lead of the Project on Workforce, an initiative that focuses on building better pathways to economic mobility through the school-to-work transition. He recently co-founded the Skills Lab with Ben Weidmann, which creates performance-based measures of “soft” skills such as teamwork and decision-making.

In 2022 he won the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions to Labor Economics. In 2018 he was awarded the David N. Kershaw Prize for distinguished contributions to the field of public policy and management under the age of 40. He served as a Coeditor of the AEJ: Applied from 2018 to 2021. He also writes occasional columns for The New York Times Economic View.