About Professor Nechyba

Thomas Nechyba received his PhD in economics from the University of Rochester in 1994 and joined Duke University in 1999 as Professor of Economics and Public Policy Studies after spending 5 years on the faculty at Stanford University (including one year as National Fellow at the Hoover Institution). At Duke, he founded the EcoTeach Center and then oversaw the rebuilding of the economics department as Department Chair from 2002 through 2009. From 2012 to 2019, he directed Duke’s university-wide Social Science Research Institute (SSRI) where he launched and directed Duke’s distinctive Masters in Interdisciplinary Data Science (MIDS). He is the author of a major textbook in microeconomics and has won both of Duke’s top teaching awards, the 2007 Duke University Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award and the 2017 Duke Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award. His research in local public finance, fiscal federalism, urban economics and the economics of education has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Spencer Foundation and was published in journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy and the International Economic Review. He has served on a number of editorial boards for top economics journals as well as the boards of local and national non-profit organizations, including as founding board member of two charter schools in Durham where he lives with his wife and three children.