Claudia Dale Goldin (born May 14, 1946) is an American economic historian and labor economist. She is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. In October 2023, she was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for having advanced our understanding of women's labor market outcomes”. The third woman to win the award, she was the first woman to win the award solo.

She is a co-director (co-directing with Claudia Olivetti and Jessica Goldberg) of the National Bureau of Economic Research's (NBER) Gender in the Economy study group, and was the director of the NBER's Development of the American Economy program from 1989 to 2017.

Goldin's historical work on women and the American economy is what she is best known for. Regarding that subject, her papers that have been most influential have been those about the impact of the contraceptive pill on women's career and marriage decisions, the education of women and men together in higher education, the history of women's pursuit of career and family, women's last names after marriage as a social indicator, the reasons most undergraduates are now women, and the new life history of women's employment.

In 1990, Goldin became the first woman to be tenured in Harvard's economics department. In 2013 she was the president of the American Economic Association.

Claudia Goldin was born in the Bronx, New York City on May 14, 1946. Her family was Jewish. Her father Leon Goldin (1918–2011) worked as a data processing manager at Burlington Industries, and her mother Lucille Rosansky Goldin (1919–2020) was the principal of Public School 105 in the Bronx. As a child, Claudia was determined to become an archaeologist, but upon reading Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters (1926) in junior high school, she became drawn to bacteriology. As a high school junior, she completed a summer school course in microbiology at Cornell University and after graduating from the Bronx High School of Science she entered Cornell University with the intention of studying microbiology.

In her sophomore year, Goldin took a class with Alfred Kahn, "whose utter delight in using economics to uncover hidden truths did for economics what Paul de Kruif's stories had done for microbiology." In 1967 she graduated from Cornell University with a BA in economics, and in 1969 she finished her master's degree in economics at the University of Chicago.

Goldin earned her PhD in Industrial Organization and Labor Economics from the University of Chicago in 1972. She wrote her dissertation ("The Economics of Urban Slavery: 1820 to 1860") on slavery in southern antebellum cities.

From 1971 to 1973, she was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin. She was also an assistant professor of economics from 1973 to 1979, at Princeton University. From 1979 to 1985 she was an associate professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and from 1985 to 1990 she was a professor of economics there. She joined the economics department at Harvard University in 1990, where she was in 1990 the first woman to be given tenure in that department.