Eileen Norcross
Eileen Norcross
- Senior Research Fellow
Eileen Norcross is a senior research fellow with the Social Change Project and the lead researcher on the State and Local Policy Project. Her work focuses on the question of how societies sustain prosperity and the role civil society plays in supporting economic resiliency. Her areas of research include fiscal federalism and institutions, state and local governments, and economic development.
She has testified before Congress on a variety of topics including the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, and the use of technology to monitor stimulus funding. A co-founder of the web site StimulusWatch.org with fellow Mercatus scholar Jerry Brito, she is also interested in the impact of technology on social change.
She blogs on state and local issues at http://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/.
Before joining Mercatus, Ms. Norcross was the 2001-2002 Warren Brookes Fellow in Journalism at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. Previously, Ms. Norcross worked for KPMG as a consultant with their transfer pricing division and as a research analyst with Thompson Financial Securities Data.
A native of New Jersey, Ms. Norcross earned her Masters in Economics from Rutgers University in 1996. She graduated summa cum laude from Rutgers University in 1993 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics and U.S. History.
Her most recent research includes a case study of New Jersey's current fiscal and economic crisis entitled, Institutions Matter: Can New Jersey Reverse Course? co-authored with Mercatus colleague Frederic Sautet. Other research includes, The Community Development Block Grant: Does it Work?; The Road Home: Helping Homeowners in the Gulf Post-Katrina, coauthored with Anthony Skriba; and From BIDs to RIDs: Creating Residential Improvement Districts, co-authored by Robert Nelson and Kyle McKenzie. She has co-authored several Mercatus On Policy briefs covering tax incentive policy in New Orleans and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Her work has been cited in numerous media outlets, and her op-eds have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, Forbes, and The New Jersey Star-Ledger.
