Shlomo Yitzhaki was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1944, and immigrated with his family to Israel in 1951. He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he earned his Bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. degrees in economics, completing his doctorate in 1976. He joined the department of economics at the Hebrew University in 1977 and directed the Falk Institute for Economic Research in Israel in the years 1995-1998. He served as the Government Statistician and Head of the Central Bureau of Statistics from 2001 to 2012.

His main research areas were income distribution, public economics, and econometrics.
 

Shlomo Yitzhaki passed away in Jerusalem in 2023.