Annamaria Lusardi

Annamaria Lusardi is the Director of the Initiative for Financial Decision-Making, a collaboration between the Graduate School of Business (GSB), the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and the Economics Department. She is also Professor of Finance (by courtesy) at the GSB and a Senior Fellow at SIEPR. Previously, she was University Professor at The George Washington University and, before that, she was the Joel Z. and Susan Hyatt Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. She has also taught at Princeton University, the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy and Booth School of Business, Columbia Business School, and was a visiting scholar at Harvard Business School. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University and an honorary doctorate from the University of Vaasa in Finland.

One of the most cited authors in financial literacy, Lusardi is the founder and Academic Director of the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center (GFLEC), which has done pioneering work on personal finance education. She has published close to 100 articles and books, including publications in the American Economic Review and the Journal of Political Economy. She is the founder and inaugural editor of the Journal of Financial Literacy and Wellbeing, published by Cambridge University Press. She has received numerous research and policy awards around the world, including grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Social Security Administration. She also won teaching awards at both Princeton and the University of Chicago.

Lusardi served as a faculty advisor for the Office of Financial Education at the U.S. Treasury. From 2017 to 2023, she was the Director of the Italian Financial Education Committee in charge of designing and implementing a national strategy for financial literacy in Italy. Her research is featured regularly in media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Forbes, and CNBC.