Carol Graham (born January 29, 1962) is the Leo Pasvolsky Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a College Park professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and the author of numerous books, papers and edited volume chapters.

Graham has written extensively and is considered an expert on issues including poverty, inequality, insecurity, the political economy of market reforms, subjective well-being, and the economics of happiness.

She recently served on a National Academy of Sciences Panel on well-being metrics and public policy,[2] and received a Distinguished Research Fellow Award from the International Society for Quality of Life Studies in September 2014.

After a year as an assistant professor at Duke University, Graham returned to Brookings where she was a guest scholar for Foreign Policy Studies until 1994.

As a visiting fellow for the World Bank’s Office of the Chief Economist and Vice Presidency for Human Resources, Graham participated in the design and implementation of safety net programs in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa and developed a comparative research project on the political sustainability of market transitions.

She has served as a special advisor to the Executive Vice President of the Inter-American Development Bank and to the Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund.

[4] Graham has testified in the United States Congress several times on the economic situation in Latin America and has discussed related topics on NBC News, National Public Radio, the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, and CNN among others.

Inadequate access to health insurance and stable employment play a role, but so do the increasing gaps between the lives of the rich and the poor.

The markers are evident in income, education, and employment data; in differences in mortality, marriage, and incarceration rates; and in other signs of societal fragmentation.

Her conclusions highlight the important role of well-being metrics in identifying and monitoring trends in life satisfaction and hope, and in desperation and misery.

—Angus Deaton, Nobel Laureate in Economics "With Happiness for All?, Carol Graham takes the study of the new inequality one step deeper.