Christelle Khalaf is an economist and the associate director of the Government Finance Research Center as well as affiliated faculty with the Department of Public Policy, Management, and Analytics at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). In addition, she is a member of the Fiscal and Economic Policy Working Group at the Institute of Government and Public Affairs.
Prior to joining UIC, Khalaf was the associate director of the Center for Business and Economic Analysis (CBEA) and affiliated faculty with the Department of Economics at the University of Wyoming (UWyo). She retains an affiliation with the CBEA as faculty fellow. Prior to UWyo, she was an economist at Ohio University’s Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs.
Khalaf has served as a member of the advisory panel on the Anchor Economy Initiative at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia in 2021, and as a member of the Ohio Economic Roundtable in 2020, which was convened by the Ohio Office of Budget and Management to discuss the state’s economic outlook given the COVID-19 health pandemic. She currently serves as Chairperson Pro-Tempore of the Employment Security Advisory Board, tasked with providing recommendations to the Illinois Department of Employment Security.
Khalaf is author or co-author of over 20 technical reports and briefs, and has been quoted in several news media outlets, including NPR, HuffPost, and Energy News Network. She is listed on NPR’s Diverse Sources Database. Khalaf has published peer-reviewed papers in Economic Inquiry, Journal of Computational Social Science, Regional Science Policy & Practice, Economic Development Quarterly, and Journal of Labor Research, among other journals. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from North Carolina State University, where she received the Jenkins Fellowship.