Nate Hilger is a researcher and writer. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Stanford University and a PhD in economics from Harvard University. 

He has worked as a professor of economics at Brown University and an economist and data scientist in Silicon Valley. While in academia he was a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and continues to hold an affiliation with the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown. In 2020 he served as a lead policy consultant on early childhood and non-K12 child development issues for Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign.

He has won grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, and the Kauffman Foundation, and given talks at universities and research institutes around the world. He has made formative contributions to the IRS Databank and the Stripe-Stanford Survey of Internet Entrepreneurship.

His academic research on child development and inequality has been published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics and other leading peer-reviewed journals, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other major media outlets. He lives with his wife and two kids in Redwood City, California.