Jeffrey R. Brown

Jeffrey R. Brown is the Larry Gies Family Professor of Business and a professor of finance at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he has been on the faculty since 2002. He served as dean of the Gies College of Business from 2015 to 2024.

An economist by training, Brown is one of the nation’s leading experts on retirement income security. For more than two decades, his research has examined annuities, Social Security, pensions, long-term care, and the behavioral and economic factors that shape how people turn savings into lifelong income. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a former director of the NBER Retirement Research Center, and the author of dozens of articles in leading economics and finance journals. He also serves on the Academic Advisory Board for the Pension Research Council and is a fellow of the LIMRA Retirement Income Institute.

Brown has advised policymakers as a senior economist with the White House Council of Economic Advisers, an economist with the President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security, a presidential appointee to the Social Security Advisory Board, and a member of the Social Security Technical Panel. He has served as a trustee of TIAA since 2009 and chairs its Risk and Compliance Committee. He is also a trustee for the American College of Financial Services.

As dean, Brown led a period of transformative growth and innovation at Gies. He was named Business School Dean of the Year by Poets & Quants in 2021 and received the Times Higher Education Lifetime Achievement Award for a Business School Dean in 2024.

His forthcoming book, “Will My Money Last?” (Greenleaf, May 2027), shifts the retirement conversation from accumulating wealth to building dependable lifetime income. Brown holds a doctorate in economics from MIT, a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University, and a bachelor’s degree from Miami University.