Chad P. Bown
Chad P. Bown, on leave for public service as chief economist for the US Department of State since January 2024, joined the Peterson Institute for International Economics as a senior fellow in April 2016 and has been the Reginald Jones Senior Fellow since March 2018. His research examines international trade laws and institutions, trade negotiations, and trade disputes. He is the host of Trade Talks, a podcast about the economics of international trade and policy that he co-created with Soumaya Keynes in 2017 and which they cohosted through 2021.
Bown previously served as senior economist for international trade and investment in the White House on the Council of Economic Advisers and most recently as a lead economist at the World Bank, conducting research and advising developing country governments on international trade policy for seven years. Bown was a tenured professor of economics at Brandeis University, where he held a joint appointment in the Department of Economics and International Business School for 12 years. He has also spent a year in residence as a visiting scholar in economic research at the World Trade Organization (WTO) Secretariat in Geneva.
Bown is also currently a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in London and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Since 2011 he has codirected, with Petros C. Mavroidis of Columbia Law School, an annual program of scholars providing legal-economic assessments of WTO case law and jurisprudence that are published with Cambridge University Press. He currently serves on the editorial boards of a number of journals, including Economics & Politics, International Economics, Journal of International Economics, Journal of International Economic Law, Journal of International Trade Law and Policy, Journal of World Trade, Review of International Organizations, and World Trade Review.
His work has been published in journals such as American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Literature, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of International Economics, and Journal of Development Economics. Bown is author of the book Self-Enforcing Trade: Developing Countries and WTO Dispute Settlement (Brookings Institution Press, 2009), and coeditor, with Joost Pauwelyn, of The Law, Economics, and Politics of Retaliation in WTO Dispute Settlement (Cambridge University Press, 2010). His volume on the global economic crisis, The Great Recession and Import Protection: The Role of Temporary Trade Barriers (CEPR and World Bank, 2011), was built from a trade policy transparency project that he initiated at the World Bank in 2004. The project resulted in the freely available, internet-based Global Antidumping Database, which he managed through 2016 as part of the World Bank's Temporary Trade Barriers Database.
Bown received a BA magna cum laude in economics and international relations from Bucknell University and a PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.