FACULTY
SPOTLIGHT
Natalie Cox has been a member of the Princeton faculty since 2019. Her research focuses on
household finance, with work examining topics including student debt, retirement savings,
and household financial decision-making. Her research has been published in leading
academic journals, including the Journal of Financial Economics. She received her Ph.D. in
Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and her undergraduate degree from
Stanford University. Natalie lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter.
Since joining the Princeton faculty, Natalie Cox has taught a wide range of finance and applied
economics courses to both undergraduate and graduate students. In 2024, Cox brought that
experience to a new audience, designing and launching Introduction to Personal Finance, a
course open to undergraduates of all majors and class years. The course grew out of a simple
observation: students can graduate from college having mastered remarkably sophisticated
subjects while receiving little formal education about some of the most important financial
decisions they will make in their own lives.
Cox designed the course to be more than a traditional financial literacy class. Students study
saving and investing, credit and debt, mortgages, insurance, taxes, and retirement, while also
learning the underlying concepts of risk and return, diversification, intertemporal decision-
making, and behavioral finance. That combination of practical application and academic rigor
has helped the course attract students from majors across the University. By making financial
concepts accessible without sacrificing their intellectual foundations, Cox hopes to give
students not just a set of rules to follow, but a framework for evaluating financial decisions
throughout their lives. The course was enthusiastically received by students in its first year,
and in 2025 Cox was awarded BCF’s Prize in Finance Teaching and Advising. For Cox, the
success of Introduction to Personal Finance reflects a broader goal that has shaped her
teaching at Princeton: helping students connect the ideas they encounter in the classroom to
consequential decisions in the world beyond it.
BACKGROUND
NATALIE COX
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