Howard Wial is Senior Vice President and Director of Research at the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City. A specialist in urban and regional economic development, he is responsible for designing and overseeing a research agenda to promote the revitalization of economically depressed communities. Dr. Wial has extensive experience as an economist and economic policy advisor. He has been a fellow of the Brookings Institution, executive director of the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an advisor in the office of the Governor of Pennsylvania. Earlier in his career, he taught at Swarthmore College, Brandeis University, Carleton College, Brown University, and Pennsylvania State University, served as an economist in the U.S. Department of Labor and the Government Accountability Office, and was research director of the Working for America Institute and the Keystone Research Center He is a co-author of Coping with Adversity: Regional Economic Resilience and Public Policy and New Rules for a New Economy: Employment and Opportunity in Post-industrial America (both from Cornell University Press) and a co-editor of the Urban and Regional Policy and Its Effects series (Brookings Institution Press). He has published widely in academic and policy-oriented publications. He is a graduate of The University of Michigan and holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a J.D from Yale Law School.
He is a 2019 grantee of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Understanding and Supporting Anchor Businesses to Build a Culture of Health program, managed by AcademyHealth.