Timothy Smeeding
Professor Emeritus
173 N. Prospect Ave.
Madison, WI 53726
About
Timothy M. (Tim) Smeeding is the Lee Rainwater Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs and Economics. and Hilldale Professor Emeritus, at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The Hilldale Professorship recognizes his distinguished contributions to teaching, research and service over an extended period.
He was director of the Institute for Research on Poverty from 2008–2014.
Smeeding was the founding director of the Luxembourg Income Study from 1983-2006 and has long advised the OECD and World Bank on poverty and inequality. He was elected the 2017 John Kenneth Galbraith Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. He also won the 2022 Roger Herriot Award for Innovation in Federal Statistics, and the 2023 Robert J. Lapham Award from the Population Association of America for the application of demographic knowledge to policy issues. Smeeding became an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in March 2025.
He was a member of the US National Academy of Sciences committee to build an agenda to reduce the number of children in poverty by half, “A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty” which was released in 2019. He chaired the National Academies of Science consensus study panel on an integrated system to allow comparisons of the income, consumption, and wealth for the same people, which was released in March 3,2024.
Professor Smeeding’s recent work has been on social and economic mobility across generations, inequality of income, consumption and wealth, and poverty in national and cross-national contexts. He received his MS and PhD in Economics from the University of Wisconsin -Madison.
His books include: SNAP Matters: How Food Stamps Affect Health and Well Being (Stanford University Press, 2015); Monitoring Social Mobility in the 21st Century (Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2015); From Parents to Children: The Intergenerational Transmission of Advantage (Russell Sage Foundation, 2012); Persistence, Privilege and Parenting: The Comparative Study of Intergenerational Mobility (Russell Sage Foundation, 2011); The Handbook of Economic Inequality (Oxford University Press, 2009); Poor Kids in a Rich Country: America’s Children in Comparative Perspective (Russell Sage Foundation, 2003); and The American Welfare State: Laggard or Leader?, (Oxford University Press, 2010).
Curriculum Vitae (pdf) Pronouns: he/him
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Education
- Ph.D., University of Wisconsin–Madison, Economics
- M.S., University of Wisconsin–Madison, Economics
- M.A., University of Connecticut, Economics
- B.A., Canisius College, Economics