David Ribar is a Professor of Economics at Georgia State University and Faculty Director of the Child and Family Policy Lab within the Georgia Policy Labs. Much of his research focuses on issues associated with poverty and household economics. He is an associate editor at the Journal of Population Economics and Review of Economics of the Household and a senior associate editor at the Southern Economic Journal. He received the 2002 Kuznets Prize from the Journal of Population Economics for his article on the consequences of young women's childbearing. He was previously a professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne and a professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, The George Washington University, and Penn State University.

He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in July 2003.