Bio

Ran Abramitzky is the Stanford Federal Credit Union Professor of Economics and Senior Associate Dean of the Social Sciences at Stanford University. His research in economic history and applied microeconomics focuses on immigration, social mobility, and inequality. An important strand of his research centers on constructing large-scale historical datasets to trace the long-run trajectories of immigrants and U.S.-born families, offering new perspectives on the American Dream.

His work has informed academic research, appeared in major media, and contributed to public discussions and policy debates on economic opportunity and immigration. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and previously served as co-editor of Explorations in Economic History.

His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, an honorary doctorate from the University of Southern Denmark, Stanford’s Economics Department and Dean’s Awards for Distinguished Teaching, and grants from the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. He is the author of The Mystery of the Kibbutz (2018), which received the Gyorgi Ranki Biennial Prize, and coauthor, with Leah Boustan, of Streets of Gold (2022), named among the best books of the year by The New Yorker, Forbes, and Behavioral Scientist. He received his PhD in economics from Northwestern University.