Bio

Nicole B. Simpson is the W Bradford Wiley Professor of Economics and is the current department chair at Colgate University. Nicole is an associate editor for the Eastern Economic Journal and is research fellow at IZA and GLO.  She holds a BA in Economics from the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and an MA and PhD in Economics from the University of Iowa.  She has been at Colgate University since 2001.  Between 2004-2018, Nicole was the the associate dean of the faculty for international initiatives at Colgate University. In 2011, she was named the Gretchen Hoadley Burke ’81 Endowed Chair in Regional Studies at Colgate.  

Nicole considers herself to be a macroeconomist who focuses on labor issues. Her research areas include immigration, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and education. Her current work has focused on studying the determinants of immigration, the impact of the EITC on labor supply when households face credit constraints, and the relationship between credit and college investment. Her work has been published in the Journal of Monetary Economics, Journal of Development Economics, American Economic Review, Southern Economic Journal, Journal of Economic Education and Contemporary Economic Policy.

She teaches courses in macroeconomics and international economics. Nicole coordinates Colgate's VITA program, where students file income taxes for local low-income households. She has also led three groups of Colgate Economics students to London, England for a semester abroad and has written an undergraduate textbook on the Economics of Immigration.