Jeffrey Wenger

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT JEFFREY WENGER

Jeffrey B. Wenger is a senior economist at RAND and director of the RAND Lowy Family Middle-Class Pathways Center, where he leads a multidisciplinary research and policy portfolio focused on economic mobility and sustaining middle-class opportunity. He provides strategic direction across a body of work that aligns rigorous empirical analysis with real-world decision-making, partnering with researchers, external scholars, and policy stakeholders to inform scalable, high-impact solutions.He is also co-director of the RAND Budget Model, a nationally recognized microsimulation tool used to assess the distributional and fiscal impacts of federal tax and transfer policies. In this role, he helps guide analytic priorities, model development, and partnerships that support evidence-based policy design and long-term learning agendas.His research spans labor markets, working conditions, workforce transitions, and economic security, with particular attention to labor force participation and the civilian transition of military personnel. Across his leadership roles, Wenger emphasizes portfolio management, cross-sector collaboration, evaluation-informed strategy, and translating complex evidence into actionable insights for policymakers, philanthropic organizations, and nonprofit leaders.Before joining RAND, Wenger was an assistant and then associate professor at the University of Georgia. He holds a Ph.D. in policy analysis from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.