Robert William Fogel is a Nobel laureate in economics. He is recognized worldwide as an economic historian and scientist. Fogel also heads the Center for Population Economics at Chicago Booth.
Fogel is a leading advocate of the use of quantitative methods in history. His research interests include socioeconomic and biomedical predictors at early ages of morbidity, mortality, and labor force participation at mid-adult and late ages, forecasting pension and health care costs, and strategic marketing forecasting.
Fogel first attracted attention in the early 1960s with his statistical analysis of the impact of railroad on 19th-century American economic development. He began to focus on what he called "the problem of creating and studying large life-cycle and intergenerational data sets," in the 1980s. His research has led to numerous publications on the topic of economics and aging. His book, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, is considered essential reading for all those interested in economics, demography, history, and health care policy. Time on the Cross, which he coauthored with Stanley L. Engerman, has been described as an "instant classic."
The author of more than 80 articles, Fogel's more recent work includes Capitalism and Democracy in 2040, Forecasting the Cost of U.S. Health Care in 2040, and the recently published The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700 (with Roderick Floud, Bernard Harris, and Sok Chul Hong).
His research has earned him numerous awards in addition to the Nobel Prize. The Alliance for Aging Research recognized Fogel as the "Indispensable Person in Health Research" for 2006 for his work on the economics of health and health care. He has won an Exxon Educational Foundation Grant, a Ford Faculty Research Fellowship, a Fulbright Grant, and several National Science Foundation Grants. Much of his research in the last fifteen years has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.
In addition to teaching at Chicago Booth, Fogel has taught courses at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Rochester, and Harvard University. He has lectured for the World Bank, Dartmouth University, and Columbia University, as well as in Argentina, Belgium, France, Holland, Norway, and Switzerland.
Fogel has a bachelor's degree from Cornell University, a master's degree from Columbia University, and a PhD from Johns Hopkins University that he received in 1963. Fogel has received honorary degrees from the University of London, Cambridge University, Harvard University, Brigham Young University, and the University of Rochester, among others. He taught at Chicago Booth from 1963 to 1975, and returned in 1981 after work at Harvard University.
Fogel's interests include music, photography, and woodworking.
Selected Publications
Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (4 vols. 1989-1992).
The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (University of Chicago Press, 2000).
The Slavery Debates, 1952-1990: A Retrospective (Louisiana State University Press, 2003).
The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
With Roderick Floud, Bernard Harris, and Sok Chul Hong, The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
With E. M. Fogel, M. Guglielmo, and N. Grotte, Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics (in progress).
