John A. List is the Director of the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics and the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago. He received his B.S. in economics from the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wyoming. List joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2005 and served as Chairman of the Department of Economics from 2012 to 2018. Prior to his appointment at UChicago, he was a professor at the University of Central Florida, University of Arizona, and University of Maryland.
List was elected a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a Fellow of both The Econometric Society and the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. He currently serves as Editor of the Journal of Political Economy and Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics.
He has received numerous awards for his contributions to economics, including the Kenneth Galbraith Award, the Adam Smith Award, the John von Neumann Award, the Omicron Delta Epsilon Distinguished Economist Award, the Cho Prize, the Bernoulli Prize, the Klein Prize, the Yrjö Jahnsson Lecture Prize, and the Kenneth Arrow Prize.
He was also named a Top 50 Innovator in the NonProfit Times in both 2015 and 2016 for his work on charitable giving. He served in the White House on the Council of Economic Advisers from 2002 to 2003 and is a Research Associate at the NBER, a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), a University Fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF), and a University Fellow at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He also holds the position of Visiting Robert F. Hartsook Chair in Fundraising at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.
His research focuses on questions in microeconomics, with a particular emphasis on using field experiments to address both positive and normative issues. For decades, his field experimental work has explored the inner workings of markets, the effects of incentive schemes on market equilibria and allocations, the integration of behavioral economics into standard models, early childhood education, and the gender earnings gap in the gig economy (including evidence from rideshare drivers).
He has published over 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and several books, including the 2013 international best-seller The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life (with Uri Gneezy).