Marjorie McElroy, Distinguished Fellow 2026

Marjorie McElroy is a Professor of Economics at Duke University. She has been a member of the Duke Economics faculty since 1970, after earning her PhD in economics from Northwestern University and spending a year at Bell Laboratories. She has also held visiting positions at the University of Virginia, the University of Illinois, and the University of Chicago.

McElroy’s scholarship spans labor economics, the economics of the family, the specification and estimation of demand systems, and financial economics. Her seminal work on Nash bargaining in families—especially her 1981 paper with Mary Jean Horney—has had a profound and enduring influence on how economists understand household decision-making. A key insight of McElroy’s approach is that household members may have conflicting preferences that negate unitary models as useful representations. Instead, household members are modeled as distinct agents whose preferences are reconciled through bargaining. In this framework, both conditions internal to the household (such as who controls household income) and external conditions (such as labor market opportunities and laws around divorce and child support) shape the allocation of resources within the household. This key insight, that household decision-making is not unitary, has been empirically tested and validated in many rigorous studies across time and economic contexts. This evidence, in turn, has important policy implications because governments—through the legal system and through the design and provision of social insurance programs—can shift internal conditions and outside options in ways that affect the distribution of resources between partners and to children. In 2008, McElroy’s election as a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists recognized her distinguished contributions to labor economics.

McElroy has also been instrumental in expanding opportunities for women in economics, especially through her service to the American Economic Association's (AEA) Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP). She served on the CSWEP board from 1987 to 1989 and again in 2011, before serving as Chair from January 2012 through June 2016. She extended her service as Chair beyond the normal term length to ensure continuity during a period of major expansion in CSWEP’s activities, leadership structure, funding, and profile. During her tenure as Chair, CSWEP’s mentoring programs expanded from fewer than 40 to more than 300 junior faculty annually, and the CSWEP Network of Departmental Liaisons grew to nearly 250 members. She fostered efforts to make CSWEP’s data collection more complete, paving the way for its increased use for research. CSWEP’s budget grew almost threefold to support these expanded activities, and two new CSWEP officer roles were created to help sustain CSWEP’s broader mission.

Throughout her career, McElroy has provided extensive professional service and academic leadership. She served as Chair of Duke’s Department of Economics from 1995 to 2002 and was a founder of the Triangle Census Research Data Center. She has held leadership roles in the Southern Economic Association, serving as Vice President and President and on its board. She has served on the NSF SES Review Panel and its Economics Panel. She is a Director Emerita of the National Bureau of Economic Research. She also has served as an AEA Vice President and as a member of the AEA Executive Committee.