Alan Krueger has published widely on the economics of education, unemployment, labor demand, income distribution, social insurance, labor market regulation, terrorism, and environmental economics. Since 1987 he has held a joint appointment in the Economics Department and Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. He is the founding Director of the Princeton University Survey Research Center. He is the author of What Makes A Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism and Education Matters: A Selection of Essays on Education, co-author of Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage, and co-author of Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies?

Professor Krueger served as Chairman of President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers and a Member of the Cabinet from 2011 to 2013. He also served as Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of the Treasury in 2009-10 and as Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor in 2004-05.

He is currently Vice President of the American Economic Association, and has been a member of the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association (2005-07) and International Economic Association. Since February 2017, he has been a member of the Board of Directors of BNP Paribas USA. He has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Russell Sage Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and the American Institutes for Research, as well as a member of the editorial board of Science (2001-09), editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives (1996-2002) and co-editor of the Journal of the European Economic Association (2003-05).