Prof. Chad Bown

Chad P. Bown is a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, a Research Fellow at CEPR in London and a Non-Resident Fellow at the WTI. 

Bown is formerly a tenured Professor of Economics at Brandeis University, where he began his career and was on the faculty for twelve years with a joint appointment in the Department of Economics and International Business School (IBS).  He also served as Senior Economist for International Trade and Investment in the White House on the President's Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) during 2010-2011. Bown spent a year in residence as a visiting scholar in Economic Research at the WTO Secretariat in Geneva, and most recently he was a Lead Economist at the World Bank conducting research and advising governments in developing countries on international trade policy..

Bown is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and he co-directs, with Petros C. Mavroidis, an annual program of scholars providing legal-economic assessments of WTO case law and jurisprudence that are published with Cambridge University Press. He also currently serves on the editorial boards of a number of academic 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.

Bown’s research interests include the political economy of international trade laws and institutions, trade policy negotiations, and trade disputes, and 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 the author of the book Self-Enforcing Trade: Developing Countries and WTO Dispute Settlement (Brookings Institution Press, 2009), and the co-editor, 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) built from his trade policy monitoring initiatives during 2008-2010. The monitoring stemmed from a trade policy transparency project he initiated at the World Bank in 2004, resulting in the freely available, Internet-based Global Antidumping Database, which is now part of the World Bank's Temporary Trade Barriers Database.

During his years on the faculty at Brandeis University, Professor Bown taught courses on the global economy, international trade policy and institutions, and international trade disputes to undergraduate students, as well as in the M.A., M.B.A., Ph.D., and Executive Education programs at Brandeis’ International Business School. He received numerous teaching awards while at Brandeis, including the University’s campus-wide Michael L. Walzer ’56 Award for Excellence in Teaching and a Kermit H. Perlmutter Fellowship Award for Teaching Excellence. At the International Business School, he was twice voted by students as Teacher of the Year. He began his career by teaching Principles of Economics, and in the fall of 2006, he even developed and co-taught a globalization course at Brandeis with New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman.

Bown received a B.A. magna cum laude in Economics and International Relations from Bucknell University and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently a member of the Advisory Board of the Bucknell Institute for Public Policy.