Speaker Biographies
Dr. Joanne Yoong
Senior Economist
University of Southern California’s Center for Economic
and Social Research (CESR)
Director
CESR’s U.S. East Coast office
Assistant Professor
National University of Singapore
Joanne Yoong is a Senior Economist at the University of Southern California’s Center for
Economic and Social Research (CESR), and Director of CESR’s U.S. East Coast office. She also
holds appointments as Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore’s Saw Swee
Hock School of Public Health, honorary Senior Lectureship at the London School of Hygiene
and Tropical Medicine, and adjunct Economist at the RAND Corporation.
Dr. Yoong was previously the chair of the RAND Behavioral Finance Forum and is currently
chairing Frontiers of Behavioral Economics: Choice and Well-Being in the Asia Pacific, a crossdisciplinary regional conference in behavioural economics to be held in Singapore in June
2015. Dr. Yoong is an investigator on multiple studies related to social and economic
development, particularly in Africa, South Asia and vulnerable populations in the U.S., and is
the lead author of the Toolkit for the Evaluation of Financial Capability Programs in Low and
Middle Income Countries recently published by the World Bank. Her research has been
supported by the World Bank Group, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the UK
Department for International Development, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD), the U.S. Department of Labor, the U.S. Social Security Administration
and the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
Dr. Yoong obtained a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University and a B.A. in Economics
summa cum laude from Princeton, with a minor in Applied and Computational Mathematics.
Prior to attending Stanford, she worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs in New York and
London.
IFIE/IOSCO Global Investor Education Conference
18-20 May 2015