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Anthony Smith, an experienced university leader and a scholar of macroeconomics and econometrics, has been named the next dean of social science in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). FAS Dean Steven Wilkinson announced the appointment in a message to the FAS community.
Smith will begin a five-year term on Jan. 1, 2026.
Smith will succeed Alan Gerber, Sterling Professor of Political Science, who has been the acting dean of social science since July 1, 2025. Gerber will return to his full-time roles on the faculty and as director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies.
Gerber served as acting dean following the departure of Ken Scheve, who served as dean of social science from July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2025 before being named the dean of the College of Arts & Letters at the University of Notre Dame.
Smith, who joined Yale’s faculty in 2003 after beginning his career at Queen’s University and Carnegie Mellon University, is the William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Economics and Professor of Management.
He has undertaken numerous leadership roles in his time at Yale. From 2019 to 2025, he served as the chair of the Department of Economics, one of the largest departments in the FAS, where he led efforts to recruit and retain its outstanding faculty. He also 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.
“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,” wrote Wilkinson in his message to the Yale community.
Beyond Yale, Smith is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and has served as an associate editor at Review of Economic Dynamics. He is currently a co-editor of Macroeconomic Dynamics.
Smith’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 has applied it to the measurement of labor income risk.
At Yale, he has taught courses in macroeconomics at all levels as well as an advanced undergraduate course on computational methods in economics. He has also served on numerous doctoral dissertation committees.
Recently, Smith’s research has focused on the intersection of macroeconomics, climate science, and environmental economics, where he collaborates with climate scientists to develop global, high-resolution models of the interactions between the economy, climate, and weather. In 2024, a team including Smith was awarded a grant from Yale Planetary Solutions for an interdisciplinary project titled “A Global, High-Resolution, Integrated Model of the Economy, Climate, and Weather,” running through March 2026.
In his message, Wilkinson thanked the members of the FAS Dean of Social Science Advisory Committee, writing that their guidance had been instrumental as they consulted with a broad range of faculty from across the FAS and the university.
