Nicole Smith

Nicole Smith is a Research Professor and Chief Economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce where she leads CEW’s econometric and methodological work. Dr. Smith has developed a framework for restructuring long-term occupational and educational projections. This framework forms the underlying methodology for Help Wanted, a report that projects education demand for occupations in the U.S. economy through 2020. She is part of a team of economists working on a project to map, forecast and monitor human capital development and career pathways.

Dr. Smith was born in Trinidad and Tobago and graduated with honors in Economics and Mathematics from the University of the West Indies (U.W.I.), St. Augustine campus. She was the recipient of the Sir Arthur Lewis Memorial Prize for outstanding research at the Master’s level at the U.W.I. and is co-recipient of the 2007 Arrow Prize for Junior Economists for educational mobility research. She received her PhD in Economics from American University in Washington, D.C.

Prior to joining CEW, Dr. Smith was a faculty member in Economics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus. Dr. Smith taught Classical and Modern Econometrics, introductory and advanced level courses in Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, Statistics, Mathematics for Economists, and Latin American Economic Development.

Her previous macroeconomic research focused on the political economy of exchange rates and exchange rate volatility in the Commonwealth Caribbean, the motivation for her MS thesis and a joint-publication at the Inter-American Development Bank. Her current research investigates the role of education and socioeconomic factors in intergenerational mobility. She is a co-author of “The Inheritance of Educational Inequality: International Comparisons and Fifty-Year Trends,” published in 2007 by the B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy.