Biography
Robin Burgess is Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. At the LSE, Robin Burgess is also Founder and Director of the International Growth Centre, and Founder and Director of the Economics of Environment and Energy (EEE) Programme at STICERD.
Research
His areas of research interest include environmental economics and the role of energy and electricity; development economics and how labor interventions can transform the lives of the ultra-poor; and state capacity and how governments can work more effectively. He has published on a variety of topics – natural disasters, political accountability, mass media, deforestation and forest fires, access to electricity, renewable energy, marine protection zones, poverty traps, bureaucracy, youth unemployment, rural banks, land reform, labor regulation, industrial policy, taxation, poverty and growth.
Education
He received a B.Sc. in Biological Sciences from Edinburgh University, a M.Sc. in Economics from the LSE and a PhD in Economics from Oxford University.
Previous
Positions
Robin Burgess has been a Visiting Assistant and Associate Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, the National Bureau of Economic Research, Ecole Polytechnique, University College London and the University of California at Berkeley. He has also been Visiting Professor at Stanford University and at the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago.
Before joining academia he served as a consultant economist with the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the Government of India.
Affiliations
Robin Burgess is a Professor of Economics, Co-Founder and Director of the International Growth Centre and Director of the Economics of Environment and Energy Research Programme, all at the LSE. He is Co-Director (with Michael Greenstone) of the Coase Project on the Economics of Climate, Energy and Environment, was the past President of BREAD, serves on the Board of Voxdev and CEGA and is an Affiliate of J-PAL and Y-RISE, a Research Fellow in CEPR and CESifo and a Fellow of the British Academy and the Econometric Society.
In 2020, Robin Burgess has founded the Economics of Environment and Energy Programme at STICERD, LSE, for which he serves as director. This programme aims to connect a diverse set of researchers on environmental economics.
Personal
He was brought up in Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, the US, the Philippines and Italy where his father worked as a doctor and his mother as a child nutritionist. He lives in North London with his wife Bronwen Burgess and daughters Isla Macbeth Burgess and Romilly Belle Burgess.