Hilary Hoynes, 2024 Holland Medal Recipient

The Daniel M. Holland Medal was created in 1993 in the memory of Daniel Holland, a Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management and long-time editor of the National Tax Journal. The Holland Medal, the most prestigious award given by the National Tax Association, recognizes lifetime achievement in the study of the theory and practice of public finance.

This year’s winner of the Holland Medal is Hilary Hoynes. Hilary is the Chancellor’s Professor of Economics and Public Policy at University of California Berkeley where she directs the Berkeley Opportunity Lab and co-directs the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality. She is currently serving as Associate Dean. She is an economist who works on poverty, inequality, and the social safety net. Her current research examines how access to the social safety net in early life affects children’s later life health and human capital outcomes.

She has long been a leading scholar in the areas of welfare reform, the earned income tax credit, the labor supply of low-skill workers, universal basic income, food stamps, and other policies affecting single mothers and their labor supply and health outcomes. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Art and Sciences, the National Academy of Social Insurance, and a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists. She has served as Co-Editor of the American Economic Review and the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on National Statistics and MDRC’s Board of Directors. Previously, she served as Vice President of the American Economic Association, a member of Governor Gavin Newsom’s Council of Economic Advisors, the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Building an Agenda to Reduce the Number of Children in Poverty by Half in 10 Years, the State of California Task Force on Lifting Children and Families out of Poverty and the Federal Commission on Evidence-Based Policy Making. In 2014, she received the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the Committee on the Status of the Economics Profession of the American Economic Association.

Hilary received her PhD in Economics from Stanford University in 1992 and her undergraduate degree in Economics and Mathematics from Colby College in 1983.

Her impressive body of work will be celebrated at the NTA’s 55th Annual Spring Symposium to be held in Washington, DC, in May 2025.