Roland Bénabou

Roland J. M. Bénabou is the Theodore A. Wells '29 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, a joint appointment at the Department of Economics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, at Princeton University. Among his numerous fellowships and honours, he is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) as well as of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), a Senior Fellow of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), and a member of the Behavioral Economics Roundtable. With respect to his editorial duties, he completed two terms as Co-Editor of the American Economic Review.

Roland J. M. Bénabou’s research spans both macroeconomic and microeconomic areas, such as the interplay of inflation and imperfect competition, or speculation and manipulation in financial markets. His recent work lies in three main areas: 

• The first links inequality, growth, social mobility and the political economy of redistribution. 
• The second centers on education, social interactions and the socioeconomic structure of cities. 
• The third is that of economics and psychology ("behavioral economics"). It focuses in particular on extrinsic incentives versus intrinsic motivation, on the determinants of prosocial behavior and on motivated beliefs, both individual (overconfidence, wishful thinking, identity) and collective (groupthink, market manias, ideology, religion).

In 2021 the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) awarded Roland Bénabou the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize awarded to a "renowned international economist whose research, in the spirit of the work undertaken by Professor Jean-Jacques Laffont, combines both the theoretical and the empirical".

Roland Bénabou's website

Professor Benabou will be visiting with us from February 5th to May 29th, 2026.