Robert Staiger is an economist specializing in the study of international trade policy rules and institutions, with particular emphasis on the economics of the GATT/WTO. His 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, Staiger 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. He also served as Editor, with Kyle Bagwell, of The Handbook of Commercial Policy, published by Elsevier in December 2016.
Staiger received his A.B. from Williams College in 1980 and his Ph.D. from Michigan in 1985. He was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Stanford from 1985 through 1991 and promoted to tenure in 1991. In 1993, he joined the Economics Department at Wisconsin, where he remained until returning to Stanford in 2006. In 2011, Staiger rejoined the Economics Department at Wisconsin, before joining the Economics Department at Dartmouth in the Fall of 2014. He is also an affiliated faculty member of Dartmouth’s Globalization Cluster.
Staiger 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). He 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; he was a Reporter for the American Law Institute in its study of Principles of Trade Law: The World Trade Organization (2002-12); and he has served on the selection panel for the WTO’s Award for Young Economists since 2009. He is also a Fellow of the Econometric Society (since 2008).
