Olivia Mitchell Named American Economic Association Distinguished Fellow

Cited for Major Contributions in Research Related to Pensions, Social Security, and Retirement

June 21, 2023

By:

Hoag Levins

Print:

Olivia Mitchell, PhD, a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI) and Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, has been named a 2023 Distinguished Fellow at the American Economic Association (AEA).

Executive Director of the Wharton Pension Research Council and Director of Wharton’s Boettner Center on Pensions and Retirement Research, Mitchell is also a Professor of both Business Economics and Public Policy, as well as Insurance and Risk Management at the school.

Major Contributions

One of five new AEA Distinguished Fellows named in 2023, the award cited her for “seminal contributions to the understanding of pensions, Social Security, retirement, and financial literacy.” She is a former Vice President and Executive Committee Member of the AEA.

Established in 1885, the AEA is a non-partisan professional organization that currently has 20,000 members from academic, business and government involved in the research and teaching of economics. It publishes eight journals that are among the field’s most prestigious.

Mitchell, who joined Wharton in 1993, is a former a Commissioner of the President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security, a member of the US Department of Labor’s Employee Retirement Income Security (ERISA) Advisory Council, and on the Board Government Accountability Office (GAO)Advisory Board.

A Senior Editor of the Journal of Pension Economics and Finance, she is an internationally recognized expert in her field with a list of awards including the Fidelity Pyramid Prize honoring published applied research addressing the goal of improving lifelong financial well-being for Americans; the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award for furthering the status of women in the economics profession; and the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance’s Roger F. Murray First Prize recognizing excellence and scientific achievement in quantitative financial research.