Appointment of the FAS Dean of Social Science

To: FAS faculty and staff
Cc: FAS Dean's Office; FAS Steering; Provost's Office; President's Office; Vice Presidents; University Cabinet; GSAS Dean's Office; Yale College Dean's Office; SEAS Dean's Office; SEAS faculty; Office of Public Affairs and Communication; Office of Faculty Administrative Services

Dear colleagues,

I am writing with an update on leadership in the FAS Division of Social Science.

I am delighted to announce that Tony Smith, William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Economics and Professor of Management, has accepted my invitation to serve as the FAS Dean of Social Science for a 5-year term, effective January 1, 2026, pending approval of the Yale Corporation.

I am grateful to Alan Gerber for serving as Acting Dean of Social Science this semester, following Ken Scheve's departure. Alan will be returning, as planned, to his full-time roles on the faculty and as Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies.

Tony Smith is a macroeconomist who joined Yale as Professor in 2003 after beginning his career at Queen's University and Carnegie Mellon University. Tony has extensive leadership experience at Yale. Notably, from 2019 to 2025, he served as Chair of the Department of Economics, one of the largest departments in the FAS. As chair, he oversaw numerous faculty recruitment, promotion, and retention cases and led the strategic direction of the department, which enjoyed many successes during this period. He has served on a variety of university- and FAS-wide committees, including the Teaching and Learning Committee, the Data Science Advisory Committee, the Executive Committee of the Cowles Foundation, the Economic Growth Center Advisory Committee, the Ethics, Politics, and Economics Advisory Committee, and the Yale Center for Research Computing Steering Committee. He also served as Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Economics from 2010 to 2013 and later chaired the Committee on the Economic Status of the Faculty (CESOF) from 2016 to 2019. He comes to the role of Dean of Social Science with deep knowledge and experience that crosses the social sciences and the FAS. 

Tony’s research spans macroeconomics and econometrics. In macroeconomics, he pioneered computational methods to analyze macroeconomic models featuring income and wealth inequality and used them to study their implications for asset pricing and the welfare consequences of macroeconomic fluctuations. He has also contributed to behavioral macroeconomics by incorporating self-control problems into dynamic macroeconomic models. In econometrics, he helped to create indirect inference—a now widely-used simulation-based approach to estimating structural economic models—and applied it to the measurement of labor income risk. His most recent work lies at the intersection of macroeconomics, climate science, and environmental economics, where he collaborates with climate scientists to build global, high-resolution models of the interactions between the economy, climate, and weather. He has published this research in leading economics and climate-science journals.

At Yale, Tony has taught macroeconomics at all levels—from introductory courses to PhD sequences—as well as an advanced undergraduate course on computational methods in economics. He has served on numerous doctoral dissertation committees and as Associate Editor of the Review of Economic Dynamics. He is currently Co-Editor of Macroeconomic Dynamics and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

I look forward to working with Tony to continue strengthening our outstanding social science departments, and to advance the initiatives that build our capacity in the data-intensive social sciences and in the applied research that addresses critical social and policy problems.

My thanks to the members of the FAS Dean of Social Science Search Advisory Committee, whose thoughtful recommendations led to this appointment. They consulted with a broad range of faculty from across the FAS and the university, and their guidance was instrumental. I am grateful to Dan Spielman, Sterling Professor of Computer Science, and Professor of Statistics and Data Science, and of Mathematics, who served as committee chair, for overseeing this process.

Sincerely,

Steven

Steven Wilkinson
Dean
Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Yale University