Melissa Kearney

Melissa Schettini Kearney (born 1974) is an American economist who is the Gilbert F. Schaefer Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Prior to joining the economics department at the University of Notre Dame in 2025, she spent more than two decades on the Economics faculty at the University of Maryland. She is also director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group; a non-resident Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution; a scholar affiliate and member of the board of the Notre Dame Wilson-Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO); and a scholar affiliate of the MIT Abdul Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). She has been an editor of the Journal of Human Resources and an editorial board member of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and of the Journal of Economic Literature. Kearney served as director of the Hamilton Project at Brookings from 2013 to 2015 and as co-chair of the JPAL State and Local Innovation Initiative from 2015 to 2018.