Robert Lawson

Robert Lawson holds the Jerome M. Fullinwider Endowed 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. Prior to SMU, he taught at Auburn University, Capital University, and Shawnee State University. Dr. Lawson is a co-author of the widely-cited Economic Freedom of the World annual reports, which present an economic freedom index for over 150 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 Ph.D. and MS in Economics from Florida State University and his BS in Economics from the Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University.