Mary Colleen Daly

Mary Colleen Daly (born 1962/1963) is an American economist, who became the 13th President and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on October 1, 2018. She serves on the Federal Reserve's rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee on a rotating basis. Previously, Daly was the Executive Vice President and Director of Research of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which she joined as an economist in 1996. Her research is in the fields of macroeconomics and labor economics and focuses on labor force dynamics and on the impacts of monetary and fiscal policy. She has published influential work on wage, employment, and labor force dynamics, economic inequality, the economics of social security and disability, and evidence-based public policy. Education and early life Daly was born in Ballwin, Missouri. Her father was a postal worker and her mother was a homemaker. She said, "we were not poor, but we weren't very wealthy, either. And at some point my family just, sort of, imploded. And my siblings went to live with my grandparents and I went to live with friends. And I dropped out of high school." At the time, she was 15 years of age. By age 16, she was living on her own, working at doughnut shops and retailer Target, struggling to scrape together a full-time salary. Daly went on to earn a GED and eventually a bachelor's degree in economics and philosophy from the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 1985. She later received a master's degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1987 and a Ph.D in economics from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University in 1994. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at National Institute of Aging at Northwestern University in 1996.