Robert Lawson

Robert Lawson is holds the Jerome M. Fullinwider Centennial Chair in Economic Freedom and is director of the O’Neil Center for Global Markets and Freedom at the Southern Methodist University (SMU) Cox School of Business. He previously taught at Auburn University, Capital University, and Shawnee State University. Dr. Lawson is a founding co-author of the widely-cited “Economic Freedom of the World” annual report, which presents an economic freedom index for over 160 countries. Lawson has numerous professional publications in journals including Public Choice, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Cato Journal, Kyklos, Journal of Labor Research, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, and European Journal of Political Economy. Lawson is past-president of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute, and a member of the Mont Pelerin Society. He earned his PhD and MS in Economics from Florida State University and his BS in Economics from the Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University. Lawson’s research has been cited over 8000 times according to Google Scholar.