Robynn Cox is an Associate  Professor of Public Policy at the UC Riverside School of Public Policy, faculty affiliate at the Presley Center for Crime & Justice, NBER Research Economist, Senior Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute. Her expertise is in the intersection of the criminal legal system and inequality. Her research is concerned with understanding barriers faced by marginalized communities, emphasizing those disproportionately faced by the Black community. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Cox addresses the topics of crime, housing, labor, aging, and health.

Dr. Cox was awarded both the Louis O. Kelso Fellowship and the Wawa Fellowship at the Rutgers University Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing. There, she performed pivotal research into the impact of Employee Stock Ownership Plans (aka ESOPs) on the economic and health outcomes of the formerly incarcerated. Most recently, Dr. Cox received a grant from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)  to study retirement savings and income outcomes of the formerly incarcerated.

Dr. Cox has served as principal and co-principal investigator on several projects examining homelessness, childhood hunger, and poverty. She is the author of “The Role of Incarceration as a Risk Factor for Cognitive Impairment”; “Roadmap to a Unified Measure of Housing Insecurity”; “The Role of Broad-Based Employee Ownership Opportunities in Prisoner Reentry” (AEA Papers & Proceedings, 2020); “Applying the Theory of Social Good to Mass Incarceration and Civil Rights” (Research on Social Work Practice, 2020); and “The Effect of Private Sector Work Opportunities in Prison on Labor Market Outcomes of the Formerly Incarcerated” (Journal of Labor Research, 2016), among numerous other publications.   

Dr. Cox holds her AB degree from Duke University and her MA and Ph.D. degrees from Georgia State University.