Hoxby is a native of Shaker Heights, Ohio, where she attended Shaker Heights High School. Her father, Steven Minter, worked in the U.S. Department of Education during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Hoxby graduated with summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University in 1988, where she won a Hoopes Prize. She then attended Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. In 1994, she received her doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1994 to 2007, she was a faculty member of Harvard University, first as an assistant professor, then as Morris Kahn Associate Professor of Economics, and starting in 2001 as the Allie S. Freed Professor of Economics. She was the university's only African-American economics professor with tenure. In 2005, she was appointed to be one of the 24 Harvard College Professors. In 2006, she won the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize. She moved to Stanford University in 2007, where she is the Scott and Donya Bommer Professor of Economics. She was named the John and Lydia Pearce Mitchell University Fellow in Undergraduate Education in 2014. She has been married to Blair Hoxby, also a Harvard graduate and a Rhodes Scholar, since 1993. He is currently a faculty member in the English department at Stanford University and does scholarly work on John Milton and Renaissance theater.
Research
Hoxby's research focuses on higher education policy, with an emphasis on elite colleges and universities. Hoxby is a Principal Investigator of the Expanding College Opportunities project, a randomized controlled trial that had dramatic effects on low-income, high achievers' college-going. For work related to this project, she recently received The Smithsonian Institution's Ingenuity Award. Her research in this area began with a demonstration that low-income high achievers usually fail to apply to any selective college. This is despite the fact that they are extremely likely to be admitted and receive such generous financial aid that they usually pay much less to attend selective colleges than they do to attend non-selective schools. This issue is now being addressed systematically owing to the project's evidence that individualized but inexpensive informational interventions cause students to take fuller advantage of their opportunities. One of Hoxby's most-cited papers, "Does Competition among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers?", argues that increased school choice improves educational outcomes for all students by improving school quality. Jesse Rothstein published a paper in which he stated that Hoxby's result depended on her hand-count of the main instrumental variable, and that he was unable to replicate her results with any of several alternative measures. Hoxby later published a response in defense of her original work. The debate received coverage in the mainstream press.
