Karnit Flug

Karnit Flug was born in 1955 in Warsaw

Flug was born in Poland in 1955 and moved to Israel with her parents as a child. The family first settled in the Kiryat HaYovel neighborhood of Jerusalem. Her father, Noah Flug, worked at the Finance Ministry, and her mother was a pediatrician.

She attended the Hebrew University Secondary School in Jerusalem. She earned a master's degree in economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1980 and a PhD in economics at Columbia University in 1985.

In 1984 she joined the International Monetary Fund as an economist, and in 1988 she joined the Bank of Israel's Research Department. She researched the labor market, minimum wage, immigrant absorption and poverty. She became deputy director of the department in 1997 and its director in 2001.

She became deputy governor in 2011 and acting governor in 2013 after Stanley Fischer left. She was sworn in as governor on November 13, 2013, and served one term until November 12, 2018. During her term she had public disagreements with Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon.

After her term she joined the Hebrew University as a professor and served as vice president for research at the Israel Democracy Institute until 2024. In 2022 she was appointed to the state commission of inquiry on the submarines affair.