Olivia S. Mitchell


Olivia S. Mitchell is an American economist and the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her interests focus on pensions and social security, and she is the Executive Director of the Pension Research Council, the oldest U.S. center devoted to scholarship and policy-relevant research on retirement security. She also heads Wharton's Boettner Center for Pensions and Retirement Research.

Career

Mitchell joined The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1993, having served from 1978 to 1993 as a professor at Cornell University; she also visited Harvard, Goethe University, Singapore Management University, and the University of New South Wales. She serves as an Independent Director for the Wells Fargo Funds Board of Trustees, and is a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research. She has served on the Advisory Board to the Singaporean Central Provident Fund, the Executive Board of the American Economic Association and chaired the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. In 2001 she served on the bipartisan President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security. She has worked as a co-Principal Investigator for the Health and Retirement Study for two decades, and she is a co-investigator for AHEAD/Health and Retirement Studies at the University of Michigan's Retirement Research Center. In 2002 and again in 2010, she was the Metzler Bank Visiting Professor at Goethe University.

Education

Mitchell earned her BA in Economics with honors from Harvard University and her MS and Ph.D. degrees in Economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She also received honorary degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of St. Gallen, and Goethe University Frankfurt.

Works

Mitchell has published widely on pensions, social security reform, retirement security, and financial literacy. Her work is highly regarded: in 2018, her paper was awarded the Best Paper Award on Behavioral Aspects of Insurance Mathematics, and in 2017 she was granted the Robert C Witt Award for Best Paper in the Journal of Risk and Insurance; she also received the EBRI Lillywhite Award the same year. In 2008 and again in 2017 she was awarded the Roger F. Murray Prize from the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance. In 2016 she was selected as a CRAIN "Top 100 Innovators, Disruptors, and Change-Makers in Business", while in 2011 she was named one of the “25 Most Influential People” and “50 Top Women in Wealth” by Investment Advisor Magazine; in 2010 she received the Retirement Income Industry Association Award for Achievement in Applied Retirement Research. In 2008 Mitchell received the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, and in 2007 she received the Fidelity Pyramid Research Institute Prize for her co-authored study on financial literacy. In 2003 she received the Premio Internazionale dell'Istituto Nazionale delle Assicurazioni, awarded at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome, Italy, and in 1999 her co-authored work received the Paul A. Samuelson Award for Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security from TIAA-CREF.

Selected recent academic articles