Rachel Kranton

Rachel E. Kranton (born c. 1962) is an American economist and James B. Duke Professor of Economics at Duke University. She is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and 2010 recipient of the Blaise Pascal Chair. She was elected to serve on the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association from 2015-2018. Kranton's research focuses on how social institutions affect economic outcomes, and has applications in a variety of fields within economics, such as economic development, international economics, and industrial organization.
More specifically, Kranton studies social networks and develops formal theories of how social networks affect economic behavior, the effects of buyer-seller networks, institutions in colonial India, and reciprocal exchange. By this, she's a major contributor to the emerging new field of economics of networks.
In a long-term collaboration, Kranton and George Akerlof of University of California, Berkeley introduce social identity into formal economic analysis. Akerlof and Kranton recently published a book, Identity Economics, which provides a comprehensive and accessible discussion of their research. In a review for Science, Robert Sugden writes: "Nonspecialist readers will find a lot of insightful and well-informed analysis of how issues of identity affect real economic problems." Bloomberg lists Identity Economics as one of the top 30 business books of 2010.

Rachel Kranton completed her undergraduate studies in Economics and Middle East Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She then received an M.P.A. in Economics and Public Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, and later her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Kranton has held positions at the University of Maryland and Duke University, and received research fellowships at the Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. In 2011–12, Kranton was a visiting professor at the Paris School of Economics.