Barry R. Weingast is the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor, Department of Political Science, and a Senior Fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He served as Chair of the Department of Political Science at Stanford University from 1996 through 2001, and he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Weingast received his Ph.D. in economics from the California Institute of Technology.
His research focuses on the political foundation of markets, economic reform, and regulation. He has written extensively on problems of political economy of development, federalism and decentralization, legal institutions and the rule of law, and democracy.
He has also served as Professor of Economics and Political Economy, School of Business, and Research Associate in the Center for the Study of American Business, Washington University in St. Louis; Visiting Professor of Business, University of California, Berkeley; Senior Research Fellow, Institute on Policy Reform; Senior Fellow, Stanford Center for International Development; Senior Fellow, Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Affiliated Faculty Member, The Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University; Fellow, Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences; and Jack N. Pritzker Distinguished Visitor, Northwestern University Pritzker Law School.
Professor Weingast's many books include The New Federalism: Can the States Be Trusted? (edited with John A. Ferejohn), Analytic Narrative (edited with Robert H. Bates, Avner Greif, Margaret Levi, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal), Self-Enforcing Institutions, The Politics of Financial Development (edited with Stephen Haber and Douglass C. North), Preferences and Situations: Points of Contact between Historical and Rational Choice Institutionalisms (edited with Ira Katznelson), Handbook of Political Economy (edited with Donald Wittman), Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework For Interpreting Recorded Human History (with Douglass C. North and John Joseph Wallis), Korean Political and Economic Development: Crisis, Security, and Institutional Rebalancing (with Jongryn Mo), and In the Shadow of Violence: The Problem of Development for Limited Access Order Societies (with Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Steven B. Webb). A contributing author to nearly sixty volumes, he is the author of over ninety articles and reviews in scholarly journals. In addition, his popular articles have appeared in such publications as the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Hoover Digest, The New Republic, Weekly Standard, Regulation, San Diego Union-Tribune, and Indian Express.
He is also the recipient of numerous awards, including the James L. Barr Memorial Award in Public Economics; Duncan Black Prize for the Best Paper of the Year in Public Choice; Adam Smith Award from the Association for Private Enterprise Education; Heinz Eulau Award for the Best Paper of the Year in the American Political Science Review; Mary Parker Follett Prize for the Best Paper in Politics and History; Franklin L. Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha Award for the Best Paper presented at the 1994 American Political Science Association Meeting; Sage Award for Best Paper in Comparative Politics presented at the 2000 meetings of the American Political Science Association; Distinguished Scholar Award in Public Policy and Lecture in the Martin School of Public Policy at University of Kentucky; William H. Riker Prize and Lecture; and Herbert Simon Award and Lecture for Outstanding Contributions to the Scientific Study of the Bureaucracy.
