Feel free to use the biography and photos below for media coverage, event promotion, or speaking engagements.
Chris Cotton
Professor of Economics and Jarislowsky-Deutsch Chair in Economic & Financial Policy
Queen’s University, cc159@queensu.ca
Biography:
Christopher Cotton is the Jarislowsky-Deutsch Chair in Economic & Financial Policy and Professor of Economics at Queen’s University, where he also serves as Director of the John Deutsch Institute for the Study of Economic Policy. He holds cross-appointments in the School of Policy Studies and the Department of Medicine’s Translational Medicine graduate faculty, and teaches in the Smith School of Business.
Dr. Cotton is an applied microeconomist working across public economics, information economics, and the economics of science, using game theory, experiments, and econometrics. His research studies how information, evidence, and expertise develop and how they shape decisions, organizations, and policy, with applications in evidence-based policy, health and medicine, development, and education and human capital. He has published in Science, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and other leading journals in and beyond economics.
His early research developed some of the first models of informational lobbying and competitive Bayesian persuasion, examining how interest groups and organizations shape what decision-makers know (e.g., Management Science 2017, AEJ Microeconomics 2015, Journal of Public Economics 2009, 2011). His experimental work closely links theory and design. He designs field experiments to enable structural estimation, as in his work separating students’ motivation from their productivity (Journal of Political Economy 2026), and ran the first randomized experiment of a large all-pay contest to study how incentives shape investment and the distribution of performance (Journal of Labor Economics 2022). In the lab, he introduced the multiple-threshold public goods framework for studying how groups choose among competing collective projects (e.g., Journal of Public Economics 2015, 2024, Exper. Econ. 2020). His other experimental work includes field experiments in education and development and the first controlled trial of paying peer reviewers at a medical journal, and his empirical work combines administrative, program, and environmental data to study policy impacts and climate shocks.
His research has increasingly focused on how evidence is produced, assessed, and used, and why decisions built on it so often fall short. Recent work includes the Policy Evidence Readiness Levels (PERLs) framework for assessing when evidence is mature enough to guide policy (Science, 2026), research on incentives in academic publishing and peer review, and work applying economic insights on human capital, organizations, and labor markets to debates about AI in science and medicine, including the “AI Expertise Paradox” (Issues in Science and Technology, National Academies) and a review of how AI is changing critical care medicine (AJRCCM).
His work has been shaped by past experience leading academic-policy partnerships and helping governments, multilateral organizations, and NGOs assess problems, evaluate programs and policies, and implement new funding and evidence systems. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he co-founded and directed the federally funded One Society Network for Emerging Infectious Disease Modeling, which brought together economists, epidemiologists, and public health leaders to assess pandemic policy, and he served on working groups for the Royal Society of Canada and Global Canada. Queen’s nominated him for the Governor General’s Innovation Award for this work. He helped grow Limestone Analytics from a start-up into an international evaluation firm, serving as Director of Research from 2017 to 2022. In that role, he led the evaluation of the IGATE-T Girls’ Education Challenge project in Zimbabwe for the UK FCDO, and advised or led projects for the WHO, UNICEF, USAID, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, Nutrition International, World Vision, and others. That experience gave him a close view of how real-world decision-makers build and use evidence and the challenges they face in doing so, questions that drive his research today.
Cotton has supervised nearly 50 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers and teaches across economics, policy studies, and business programs at Queen’s. He earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University and previously taught at the University of Miami School of Business.
Headshots:
