Jed Kolko
Jed Kolko, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics since November 2025, joined the Institute as a nonresident senior fellow in April 2025. He is also a senior advisor to the JPMorganChase Institute.
From 2022 to 2024, he was undersecretary for economic affairs at the US Department of Commerce. In that role he led economic research for the department, oversaw the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and launched the Regional Economic Research Initiative.
Previously he was chief economist at Indeed, the job search website, and at Trulia, the real estate site. In those roles he built research teams that developed alternative economic indicators using proprietary data. Earlier he was an associate director at the Public Policy Institute of California and a research director at Forrester Research, a technology consulting firm. He has served on the boards of the National Association for Business Economics and the California Budget and Policy Center, and has been a regular contributor to the New York Times.
His own research spans regional economic development, geographic inequality, labor markets, immigration, housing policy, technology policy, and AI ethics. He is passionate about maintaining the quality, integrity, and usefulness of official statistics.
He has a PhD in economics and an AB in social studies from Harvard University.