Yoel Haitovsky was born in Lithuania in 1933 and immigrated with his family to Eretz Yisrael (Mandatory Palestine) in 1934. He earned a bachelor's degree in agricultural economics from North Carolina State College and subsequently completed both his master's and Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University, receiving his doctorate in 1966. He was a faculty member at the Technion's Industrial Engineering and Management Faculty from 1966 to 1967 and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in New York from 1967 to 1969.

In 1969 Haitovsky joined the Hebrew University and became a faculty member in the Departments of Economics and Statistics.

His primary research interests were econometrics and statistics, focusing on econometric models of estimation and forecasting and their applications.
Yoel Haitovsky passed away in Jerusalem in 2019.