Erik Hurst studies macroeconomic policy, consumption, time use, entrepreneurship, and household financial behavior. Hurst's research includes Life Cycle Prices and Production forthcoming in the American Economic Review; Social Security and Unsecured Debt forthcoming in the Journal of Public Economics; Liquidity Constraints, Household Wealth, and Entrepreneurship, which appeared in the Journal of Political Economy (2004); The Correlation in Wealth Across Generations, which also appeared in Journal of Political Economy (2003); and Home is Where the Equity Is: Mortgage Refinancing and Household Consumption, which was published in the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking (2002). Additionally, his research on Measuring Trends in Leisure which appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2007 was written up in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Economist.
His current paper Conspicuous Consumption and Race explores the differential spending on status goods between black and white households. He won the 2006 TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security for his article about the transition to retirement titled Consumption Versus Expenditure, published in the Journal of Political Economy (2005). Hurst was the inaugural recipient of the John Huizinga Faculty Fellowship in 2005 and was awarded the William Ladany Research Award in 2001, which is given to a Junior Faculty Member with promising research potential.
In 2006, he was named a Neubauer Faculty Fellow and the previous year he was named a Charles E. Merrill Scholar, an honor given to GSB faculty who conduct promising research in the area of policy studies. He also has received grants from the Michigan Retirement Research Center and the Department of Health and Human Services. Prior to moving to Chicago, Hurst won two teaching awards while a graduate student at the University of Michigan. Additionally, in 2008, the MBA's selected him as the recipient of the Emory Williams Award for Outstanding MBA Teaching. He is a member of the Economic Fluctuations Group, Aging Group, and Public Economics Group at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics and finance from Clarkson University in 1993. He received a master's degree in economics in 1995 and a PhD in economics in 1999 from the University of Michigan. He joined the GSB faculty in 1999.
