Gérard Roland

About Gérard Roland

Gérard Roland is the E. Morris Cox professor of economics and professor of political science at the University of California Berkeley where he has been since 2001. He was the chair of the economics department between 2008 and 2011. In 1998-1999, he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences in Stanford. He has received many honors including an honorary professorship from the Renmin University of China in Beijing in 2002. He is currently editor of the Journal of Comparative Economics.He is the author of over 150 journal articles, chapters in books, and books and has been published in leading economics journals. His research has covered many areas in the field of transition economics since the early nineties where he has covered mainly political economy aspects of transition but also financial reform, privatization, restructuring and macroeconomic issues. He wrote the leading graduate textbook on the subject Transition and Economics published in 2000 at MIT Press and translated in various languages, including Chinese and Russian. He co-organized with Olivier Blanchard a Nobel symposium on the transition economics in 1999. He has also been very active in recent years in the field of political economics where he has done seminal work on the economic effects of different political institutions around the world. He has also made intellectual contributions to debates on the institutional structure of the European Union. His recent book Democratic Politics in the European Parliament with Simon Hix and Abdul Noury has received the Richard F. Fenno Prize for the Best Book Published in the Field of Legislative Studies during 2007. In recent years, his research has broadened to developing economies in general where he tries to understand the links between institutions, institutional change and economic development. He just finished a new undergraduate textbook on economics of development (2013, Addison-Wesley).He has been a regular consultant to the IMF, World Bank and EBRD in the last 15 years and has also consulted for the European Commission and the Inter-American Development Bank. He has been several times on mission with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz in country dialogues for Stiglitzs institute, the Initiative for Policy Dialogue.