Robert W. Staiger

Roth Family Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Sciences and Professor of Economics, Dartmouth College; and Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research

I am an economist specializing in the study of international trade policy rules and institutions, with particular emphasis on the economics of the GATT/WTO. My research has been published in a variety of academic journals, and in a book, The Economics of the World Trading System, co-authored with Kyle Bagwell and published by MIT Press (2002). In the Fall of 2016 I gave the Ohlin Lectures at the Stockholm School of Economics, which led to a second book, A World Trading System for the Twenty-First Century, published by MIT Press in its Ohlin Lecture series in December of 2022 and featured in Trade Talks Episode 180 and in a “Meet the Author” session at the WTO Public Forum 2023. I also served as Editor, with Kyle Bagwell, of The Handbook of Commercial Policy, published by Elsevier in December 2016.

I received my A.B. from Williams College in 1980 and my Ph.D. from Michigan in 1985. I was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Stanford from 1985 through 1991 and promoted to tenure in 1991. In 1993 I joined the Economics Department at Wisconsin, where I remained until returning to Stanford in 2006. In 2011 I rejoined the Economics Department at Wisconsin, before joining the Economics Department at Dartmouth in the Fall of 2014. I am also an affiliated faculty member of Dartmouth’s Globalization Cluster.

I was a National Fellow of the Hoover Institution (1988-89), an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow (1990-92), a Senior Staff Economist at CEA (1991-92) and a CASBS Fellow at Stanford (1996-97 and 2020-21). I was a Co-Editor of the Journal of International Economics from 1995 to 2010 and served as Editor (with Charles Engel) from 2010 through 2017; I was a Reporter for the American Law Institute in its study of Principles of Trade Law: The World Trade Organization (2002-12); and I have served on the selection panel for the WTO’s Award for Young Economists since 2009. I am also a Fellow of the Econometric Society (since 2008).

In addition to the  2016 Ohlin Lectures at the Stockholm School of Economics, in the Spring of 2018 I gave the Dr. Frank Anton Distinguished Lecture at the University of Calgary and the Frank D. Graham Memorial Lecture at Princeton University. And in the Fall of 2018 I gave the Luca d’Agliano Lecture in Turin Italy and the Jones Lecture at the University of Rochester.