About - Chad P. Bown

Chad P. Bown was sworn in as the U.S. Department of State Chief Economist on January 29, 2024.

Bown is on leave for public service from the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) in Washington, DC where he previously served as the Reginald Jones Senior Fellow since 2018. Bown had joined PIIE as a senior fellow in 2016 and, in 2017, he and Soumaya Keynes (The Financial Times) co-created Trade Talks, a podcast about the economics of international trade and policy, a show that they co-hosted until 2021. Overall, Bown hosted or co-hosted 200 episodes of the podcast. His popular writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Harvard Business Review, and more.

Bown served as Senior Economist for International Trade and Investment in the White House on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) during 2010-2011. He has spent a year in residence as a visiting scholar in Economic Research at the WTO Secretariat in Geneva, and was a Lead Economist until 2016 at the World Bank, where he worked for seven years conducting research and advising developing countries on international trade policy.

Bown is formerly a tenured Professor of Economics at Brandeis University, where he began his career and was on the faculty for twelve years with a joint appointment in the Department of Economics and International Business School (IBS).

Bown’s academic research has examined the political economy of international trade laws and institutions, trade policy negotiations, trade disputes, supply chains, and industrial policy. His work has been published in journals such as American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of International Economics, and Journal of Development Economics. He is author of the book Self-Enforcing Trade: Developing Countries and WTO Dispute Settlement (Brookings Institution Press, 2009), and his volumes include Economics and Policy in the Age of Trump (CEPR Press, 2017) and The Law, Economics, and Politics of Retaliation in WTO Dispute Settlement (Cambridge University Press, 2010, with Joost Pauwelyn).

Bown’s volume on the global economic crisis, The Great Recession and Import Protection: The Role of Temporary Trade Barriers (CEPR and World Bank, 2011) built from his trade policy monitoring initiatives during 2008-2010. The monitoring stemmed from a trade policy transparency project he initiated at the World Bank in 2004 and managed through 2016, resulting in the freely available, Internet-based Global Antidumping Database, which he developed into the World Bank’s Temporary Trade Barriers Database.

Bown is a Research Fellow at CEPR in London, a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and he co-directed, with Petros C. Mavroidis, an annual program of scholars providing legal-economic assessments of WTO case law and jurisprudence that were published with Cambridge University Press. He has also served on the editorial boards of a number of academic journals, including Economics & Politics, Journal of International Economic Law, Journal of International Trade Law and Policy, Journal of World Trade, Review of International Organizations, and World Trade Review.

During his years on the faculty at Brandeis University, Professor Bown taught courses on the global economy, international trade policy and institutions, and international trade disputes to undergraduate students, as well as in the M.A., M.B.A., Ph.D., and Executive Education programs at Brandeis’ International Business School. He received numerous teaching awards while at Brandeis, including the University’s campus-wide Michael L. Walzer ’56 Award for Excellence in Teaching and a Kermit H. Perlmutter Fellowship Award for Teaching Excellence. At the International Business School, he was twice voted by students as Teacher of the Year.

Bown received a B.A. magna cum laude in Economics and International Relations from Bucknell University and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.