
Media Contact
Jennifer Ellen French
Public Relations Manager
Andrew Young School of Policy Studies
[email protected]
ATLANTA — Professor David C. Ribar has been appointed associate dean for research in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, effective July 1, 2024.
Ribar has served as interim associate dean for faculty affairs and research in the college since January 2023. He joined Georgia State University in August 2020 as the faculty director of the Child & Family Policy Lab of the Georgia Policy Labs and as a professor in the Department of Economics.
“Dr. Ribar brings a passion for high-impact research to this new role,” Dean Thomas J. Vicino said. “Given his impressive record of executing collaborative, actionable research with government agencies, nonprofit organizations and businesses, he is well prepared to lead our research portfolio.”
In his new role, Ribar will partner with the college’s leadership team to advance the mission and strategic plan of the college by fostering collaborative and interdisciplinary research and scholarship across its academic units and research centers, institutes and labs, and with the university community. He will focus on research administration, infrastructure and support to help advance the college’s goals to expand sponsored research and encourage research development initiatives while cultivating relationships and opportunities with external funders. He will also lead a new task force on research innovation.
Ribar is an applied microeconomist and interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on family dynamics, the causes and consequences of economic disadvantage, evaluating programs to alleviate disadvantage, and measuring and modeling well-being. He has maintained a robust research portfolio throughout his career that has been actively funded with support from organizations including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Administration for Children and Families, the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and the W. T. Grant Foundation.
His work has been published in leading journals including the American Economic Review, American Sociological Review, Journal of Political Economy and the Journal of Public Economics. He is an associate editor at the Journal of Population Economics and the Review of Economics of the Household, a senior associate editor of the Southern Economic Journal, a member of the editorial board of Social Service Review and a research fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics.
Ribar has previously held faculty and administrative positions at The University of Melbourne, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, The George Washington University and The Pennsylvania State University. Additionally, he has served as a research analyst at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and a research fellow at the U.S. Census Bureau. He holds a Ph.D. and A.M. in Economics from Brown University and a B.A. in Economics and Computer Sciences from William & Mary.
“As we continue to strategically advance our initiatives in alignment with Georgia State University’s Blueprint to 2033: Our Place, Our Time, this new appointment marks another important milestone to further develop the leadership team in the college,” Vicino said.