Willa Rubin
Associate Producer, Planet Money
Willa Rubin has produced dozens of NPR’s Planet Money episodes.
And in her reporting, she focuses on where culture meets wonky economics. She’s told the origin story of the Phillips Curve, a foundational inflation theory economists love to hate. As an International Center for Journalists - Arthur Burns Fellowship awardee, she wrote for Der Tagesspiegel, and reported on döner kebabs and European Commission regulation for The Indicator.
Rubin has covered unconventional side effects of global events, such as a spark in candle sales ahead of Germany’s first winter without Russian gas, and the impact of Canada’s tariffs on a small business owner in Ottawa who imported American playing cards.
She’s given odes to economic data revisions, and field-produced in rural Maine to track down where an estate trust meant for a town’s stray cats actually went. Rubin has also guest-edited and produced episodes of NPR’s science podcast, Short Wave.
Before coming to Planet Money, she helped launch and co-produced Gimlet Media/Spotify and the Wall Street Journal’s award-winning daily narrative podcast "The Journal." She got her start in podcasting, and in the Planet Money universe, working at The Indicator from Planet Money. Rubin has an M.A. in Journalism from the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY and a Bachelor’s of Arts from Oberlin College.
