Dean Baker (b. July 13, 1958) is an American macroeconomist and co-founder and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He previously was a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and an assistant professor of economics at Bucknell University. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. His B.A. is from Swarthmore College. He blogs for The American Prospect.

Basing himself on house-price data-sets produced by the US government and Yale economist Robert Shiller, Baker was the first economist to point out the bubble in the US housing market in 2002, and one of the few economists to correctly predict that the collapse of this bubble would lead to recession. He has been sharply critical of the regulatory framework of the real estate and financial industries, the use of financial instruments like CDOs, and the incompetence and conflicting interests of US politicians or regulators, such as Hank Paulson.

Baker opposed the US government bailout of Wall Street banks on the basis that the only people who stood to lose from their collapse were their shareholders and well-paid CEOs. As regards any hypothetical, negative effects of not doing the bailout, he has explained repeatedly that, "We know how to keep the financial system operating even as banks go into bankruptcy and receivership," citing US government action taken during the S&L crisis of the 1980s. He has ridiculed the US elite for favoring it, asking, "How do you make a DC intellectual look less articulate than Sarah Palin being interviewed by Katie Couric? That's easy. You ask them how failure to pass the bailout will give us a Great Depression."