Rucker Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Johnson is a Faculty Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Research Affiliate of the National Poverty Center and the Institute for Research on Poverty.



As an applied microeconomist, his work considers the role of poverty and inequality in affecting life chances. He has focused on such topics as the long-run impacts of child neighborhood and school quality on socioeconomic success and later-life health; the determinants of intergenerational mobility; the societal consequences of incarceration; effects of maternal employment patterns on child well-being; the socioeconomic determinants of health disparities over the life course; and the effects of growing up poor and poor infant health on childhood cognition, educational attainment, adult health and economic status. Johnson was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar from 2002-04, prior to joining the faculty at UC-Berkeley. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation working on a book project that examines the long legacy of school desegregation.

Johnson received a B.A. Magna Cum Laude in Economics from Morehouse College in 1995, and an M.A. and Ph.D. both in Economics from the University of Michigan in 1997 and 2002 respectively.