Carol Graham is the Leo Pasvolsky Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and College Park Professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. From 2002-2004, she served as a Vice President at Brookings. She is currently serving on a National Academy of Sciences panel on well-being metrics for public policy. She has also served as Special Advisor to the Vice President of the Inter-American Development Bank, as a Visiting Fellow in the Office of the Chief Economist of the World Bank, and as a consultant to the International Monetary Fund and the Harvard Institute for International Development. She is the author of numerous books and articles. Her most recent books are: The Pursuit of Happiness: An Economy of Well-Being (Brookings, 2011) and Happiness around the World: the Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires (Oxford, 2009) (both publsihed in paperback and in several foreign languages). She has published articles in a range of journals including the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization; World Bank Research Observer; Health Affairs, Journal of Socio-Economics; Journal of Development Studies; World Economics; Journal of Human Development; and Foreign Affairs. She has an A.B. from Princeton University, an M.A. from Johns Hopkins, and a D.Phil from Oxford University. She is the mother of three children.

She joined IZA as a Research Fellow in February 2010.