Chris Cotton

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Research overview: I study learning and information, incentives and institutions, and how they shape strategic decisions and collective action. I’m particularly interested in evidence-based policy and understanding why well-meaning efforts fail to achieve lasting impact.

My research uses economic theory, experiments, and empirical methods, supporting a research program examining how knowledge is built, communicated, and translated into strategy and policy. It has wide applications across subfields of economics, and collaborations with leading scientists in other fields. My work has been published in American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and other leading journals across economics and in business, education, medicine, and the sciences.

See my publications and my CV.

Research Supervision, Teaching, & Program Development: I have supervised the research of more than 50 graduate students who have gone on to successful careers in academia, government, and the private sector (list on my CV). My teaching includes graduate courses in economic theory, experiments, and applied microeconomics (public, development, labor, applied econometrics), as well as professional courses in policy and business schools. I co-created the Certificate in Professional Impact Analysis, led the redesign of the economics curriculum in Queen’s Masters of Public Administration, and developed a global professional-training program on public finance and education systems for USAID. Across these initiatives, my work has focused on building individual and institutional capacity to use evidence rigorously and responsibly.

Academic & Policy Leadership: I am Director of the John Deutsch Institute for the Study of Economic Policy (JDI) at Queen’s University and co-lead of the Canadian Economic Association’s Canadian Public Economics Group (CPEG). I am an invited researcher with J-PAL at MIT.

I have sought opportunities to more deeply understand the real world institutions and decision making processes that are the subject of my research. This has led to projects and partnerships with governments, organizations, and funding organizations. Through Limestone Analytics, I have worked on projects building and interpreting evidence for US and UK government agencies, several developing countries, and prominent NGOs, foundations, and multinationals.

On public health policy, I have worked with the World Health Organization, Nutrition International, the Public Health Agency of Canada, Institute for Health Economics, Global Canada’s Covid Strategic Choices Group, and the Royal Society of Canada’s working group on economic recovery. From 2021-2024, I co-led the NSERC- and PHAC-funded One Society Network for Emerging Infectious Disease Modeling, a nationwide research initiative studying the broader impacts of pandemic policy. This work culminated in my nomination for the 2022 Governor General’s Innovation Award, the book Lasting Disruption, national research infrastructure, and an Erdős number of 2.

I limit my ongoing policy engagement to partnerships aligned with my scholarly research. I am always happy to talk with real world leaders who want to undertake scientific studies within their organizations.

Recent News & Updates:
2/3/26: New Forum article at Issues in Science and Technology (National Academy of Sciences)
introducing the “AI-Expertise Paradox”: the tools that let us perform more like experts reduce our chances of becoming experts, building on David Autor’s article on AI and expertise.
1/10/26: Article disentangling drivers of studying and learning published at the Journal of Political Economy.
1/5/26: Article using optimal full matching analysis to disentangle the impact of different intervention features accepted at the Journal of Development Effectiveness.
1/5/26: Kicking off a course on evidence-based policy and program evaluation at the Queen’s School of Policy Studies.
12/28/25: New working paper on how the timing of star-performer engagement on teams affect approaches to collaboration and eventual team success.

12/12/25: Lasting Disruption: Economic and Social Impacts of COVID-19 on Canada has been published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. I was the editor for the volume, which represents collaborations among economists, epidemiologists, public health researchers, and other researchers from the One Society Network, the Royal Society of Canada, and the NSERC Emerging Infectious Disease Modeling initiative leadership.
12/2/25: another round of commentary about my experiment incentivizing journal referees has been published at Critical Care Medicine.
12/1/25: two-part summary of my speech at the 38th Annual Smith School of Business Economic Forecast Lunch posted on EconomicsandPolicy.ca. Part 1 (the Canadian economy is broken) and Part 2 (five scenarios for an uncertain economy).
11/28/25: Media coverage in the Whig Standard.
11/27/25: speaker at the KEDCo and Smith School of Business 38th Annual Forecast Lunch.
11/20/25: my forthcoming Journal of Political Economy paper on the reasons kids struggle in school is now online.
11/10/25: Lasting Disruption, my forthcoming book (I am the editor and a contributing author) from McGill-Queen’s University Press is finally going to the printer.
11/7/25: Canadian Public Economics Group annual meetings (I co-lead CPEG).
10/22/25: new publication questioning the interprovincial trade reform promises in IRPP volume.
10/21/25: appointed specialty editor at the upstart Behavioral Public Policy, Frontiers in Behavioral Economics open science journal.
10/20/25: kicking off four weeks of executive teaching in the CPIA program at Smith School of Business.
9/25: new publication on the role of evidence in COVID policy published in Frontiers in Public Health.
9/5/25: I am teaching a new course: MGMT 988: Stats & Econometrics for masters and PhD students in the Smith School of Business.
9/3/25: 10th International Conference on Peer Review and Scientific Publishing.
8/25: new publication on how droughts and environmental shocks impact education in American Educational Research Journal (flagship journal in education).
6/9/25: editorial in The Hill Times on interprovincial trade reform.
6/6/25: co-authored an article summarizing my recent work on community engagement in support of girls’ education at VoxDev.
5/25: Canadian Economics Association annual meetings (I organized the public economics sessions).
5/25: our March article in Critical Care Medicine kicked off forum discussion and several commentary pieces.
4/25/25: moderator for Queen’s School of Policy Studies public symposium on Integrating Health and Social Policy.
3/25: my work with PhD candidate Daniel Teeter is guiding interprovincial trade reform.
3/25: media coverage for the CCM article in Nature, Nature again, and the Queen’s Gazette.
3/25: new publication in Critical Care Medicine; this was the lead article and was accompanied by a journal forward and editorial.
3/25: expert report on the impact of government policy on inflation during COVID-19 (litigation support).
2/25: new publication in World Bank Economic Review.