Justine S. Hastings is an economist, academic, policy advisor, and technology sector leader who serves as the Chief of People-centered Science and Vice President of People Experience and Technology (HR) at Amazon. Prior to this position, she served as a tenured Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs at Brown University, and as an Associate Professor of Economics at Yale University before that. She currently serves as an Affiliate Professor Economics at University of Washington and as a Faculty Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Hastings’ areas of research expertise include Public Economics, Behavioral Economics, and Industrial Organization. She has contributed to scientific knowledge in the areas of education policy, workforce policy, health care, advertising and consumer protection, consumer finance and regulation, social safety-net program design, and market structure and competition. Her research employs diverse empirical techniques including field experiments, survey analysis, machine learning and artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, analysis of large administrative datasets, and structural demand and supply estimation. Her research was cited in the 2017 Nobel Prize scientific background materials, and has been used to shape public policy improvements around the world.
Hastings served as an academic advisor to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for five years, as the editor of the International Journal of Industrial Organization, an Editorial Board member of the Journal of Economic Literature, and a co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics. She serves on the board of Research Improving People’s Lives (RIPL), a non-profit tech-for-social-impact organization she helped found. Justine received her PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley, and her bachelor’s degree from UC Davis.
