Annamaria Lusardi

Annamaria Lusardi is an Italian-born economist and the Denit Trust Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Economics and Accountancy at Stanford University School of Business. In 2011 she founded and serves as the Academic Director of the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center. Her interests focus on financial literacy and financial education. As of early 2025, she was also a non-resident fellow at Bruegel.

Education Annamaria Lusardi studied at Bocconi University, located in Milan, Italy. In 1986 she graduated with a BA in economics. She earned a PhD in economics in 1992 at Princeton University.

Career After graduating from Princeton, Lusardi taught economics at Princeton University, the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and Columbia Business School. She also taught at Dartmouth College since 1992 as an Associate Professor of Economics. In 2006, Lusardi became a Professor Economics at Dartmouth. From 2009 to 2019, she was the Joel Z. and Susan Hyatt Professor of Economics at Dartmouth. In 2010, Lusardi began working at the George Washington School of Business where she is a chair professor. Since 2014, Lusardi has served as the Denit Trust Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Economics and Accountancy at the School of Business. Lusardi is the director of the George Washington University Financial Literacy Center, a joint initiative between Dartmouth College, the RAND corporation, and the Wharton School. In 2014 she was elected chair of the Research Committee of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development/International Network on Financial Education.

While Lusardi is an economist by training, she views economics as the foundational discipline underpinning personal finance, with personal finance representing a specialized application of economic principles focused on individual decision-making and financial well-being.

Lusardi served as the faculty advisor to the office of Financial Education of the U.S. Treasury from September to December in 2009.

Awards and honors In 2013, Lusardi received the William E. Odom Visionary Leadership Award from the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy, and the National Numeracy Network's inaugural 2012 Steen Award. She is the recipient of the Fidelity Pyramid Prize, a $50,000 award to authors of published applied research that best helps address the goal of improving lifelong financial well-being for Americans. The University of Vaasa (Finland) awarded her an honorary degree of Economics and Business Administration in 2019. She has also received awards or scholarships from FINRA, SABE, Skandia and Williams A. Forbes.

Selected publications

(Awarded the Fidelity Pyramid Prize. )