About | Tobin Center for Economic Policy

The Tobin Center will enhance Yale’s vital role in informing data-driven discussions of public policy...supporting Yale’s emphasis on the importance of using empirical approaches in the social sciences to address the greatest challenges of today.

- Yale President Peter Salovey

Recent advances in economics, data, and analytics present exciting and untapped opportunities to better understand and address modern policy challenges. Yale’s Tobin Center for Economic Policy is advancing research insights and innovations for impact by bringing them to the policy arena. We seek to achieve measurable advances on critical issues from health, education, and economic mobility to climate change, digital markets, and evidence-based policy.

Founded in 2018 and named for the late James Tobin, iconic faculty member and Nobel laureate, the Tobin Center is the latest step in the university’s strategic investment in data-driven, social-science scholarship that shapes public policy. As a platform for national, non-partisan policy impact at Yale, the Tobin Center works to identify and scale effective, non-partisan, and practical policy solutions that strengthen families, communities, and the nation.

James Tobin

James Tobin, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize in economics, joined the faculty of the Yale Department of Economics in 1950 and was appointed Sterling Professor of Economics in 1957, remaining at Yale until his retirement in 1988 and death in 2002. During this career spanning over 50 years, Tobin established himself as a leader in the field through many outstanding contributions to economic theory. His fundamental concern, however, was how economic policies affected people’s lives. The Tobin Center for Economic Policy at Yale honors its namesake’s legacy by casting empirical light onto contemporary issues in domestic economic policy.