David Figlio is a nonresident senior fellow in the Work, Education, and Labor Division at the Urban Institute and the Gordon Fyfe Professor of Economics and Education at the University of Rochester. He conducts research on a wide range of education and health policy issues, from school accountability and standards to welfare policy and policy design, as well as the relationship between education and health. He also studies the academic profession itself. Figlio has been part of numerous national education task forces and panels and has advised US agencies and several US states and foreign nations on the design, implementation, and evaluation of educational policies.

An elected member of the National Academy of Education, Figlio has served as the inaugural coeditor of Education Finance and Policy, editor in chief of the Journal of Human Resources, and president of the Association for Education Finance and Policy. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; a research fellow of the IZA Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn, Germany; a member of the CESifo Network on the Economics of Education in Munich, Germany; and an affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Figlio has served as dean of Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy and provost at the University of Rochester. He earned his PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.