Shelly Lundberg

Shelly Lundberg is Distinguished Professor of Economics and Leonard Broom Professor of Demography at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where her research sits at the intersection of gender, family, and labor economics. Her work has shaped how economists think about household decision-making, marriage markets, and the roots of gender inequality — contributions recognized by her election as an American Economic Association Distinguished Fellow and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

A graduate of the University of British Columbia, Lundberg earned her Ph.D. from Northwestern University and has held positions at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Bergen, and the University of Washington, where she was founding Director of the Center for Research on Families and Director of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology. She has been honored with a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the University of Bergen and is a Fellow and past President of the Society of Labor Economists. She has also served as President of the European Society for Population Economics and as Vice-President of the American Economic Association.

She has published extensively in leading journals including the Journal of Political Economy and the American Economic Review and co-edited the Handbook of the Economics of the Family (Elsevier, 2023), and her research has been funding by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. She served as Chair of the American Economic Association's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession and has spoken, written, and organized in service of increasing diversity in economic scholarship for many years. She delivered the UCSB Faculty Research Lecture in 2022, one of the university's highest scholarly honors, and received the Jacob Mincer Award for lifetime achievement in labor economics from the Society of Labor Economists in 2026.

Her new book, How Economics Discovered Women: Bringing Gender Economics into the 21st Century, forthcoming from University of California Press, draws on decades of research and personal experience to tell the story of how the economics profession came to grapple seriously with gender — and where that conversation must go next.