Gérard Roland

Dr. Gérard Roland is the E. Morris Cox Professor of Economics, and Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as visiting professor at Tsinghua University Beijing. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in 1998-1999, and received an honorary Professorship from the Renmin University of China in Beijing in 2002. Dr. Roland is the author of over 100 journal articles, books and book chapters, and he has been published in leading economic journals. His research has included study of transition economics since the early nineties, covering the political economy aspects of transition as well as financial reform, privatization, restructuring and macroeconomic issues. He wrote the leading graduate textbook on the subject, Transition and Economics, published in 2000 and translated into various languages, including Chinese. He co-organized with Olivier Blanchard a Nobel symposium on 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 effect of political institutions around the world. Dr. Roland has also made contributions to the economics of enlargement and more generally the institutional structure of the European Union. His recent book Democratic Politics in the European Parliament (with Simon Hix and Abdul Noury) 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 investigates the links between institutions, institutional change and economic development.

Dr. Roland has been a regular consultant to the IMF, the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development over the last two decades, and has consulted for the European Commission and the Inter-American Development Bank. He has been on several country missions with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz as part of Dr. Stiglitz’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue.