Eileen Norcross is the Vice President of Policy Research and a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Her research focuses on questions of public finance, how economic institutions support or hamper economic resiliency and civil society, the relationship between culture and institutions, and polycentricity in governance. She specializes in fiscal federalism and institutions, state and local government finance, public governance, and economic development. Her work has been cited in various media outlets, and her op-eds have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Christian Science Monitor, US News & World Report, and Forbes. Norcross has testified before Congress on the Community Development Block Grant program, state and local pension underfunding, municipal bankruptcy, and the use of technology to monitor stimulus funding. She has also testified on fiscal policies in Pennsylvania, Florida, California, New Hampshire, and Montana. She served as a public member on the Virginia Commission on Employee Retirement Security and Pension Reform from 2016 to 2017.  Her academic publications include articles in the Maryland Journal, The Journal of Law, Economics and Policy, the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, and a book chapter in The Political Economy of Hurricane Katrina and Community Rebound, edited by Emily Chamlee-Wright and Virgil Henry Storr. She received both her MA in economics and her BA in economics and American history from Rutgers University.