Background
Robert William Fogel was born on July 1, 1926, in New York City.
Robert William Fogel was born on July 1, 1926, in New York City.
He attended Cornell and received a B.A. in 1948, obtained his M.A. in 1960 from Columbia, and his Ph.D. from John Hopkins in 1963.
It was at Cornell that Fogel became interested in the correlations between history and economics. He began utilizing quantitative methods to answer questions involving the economic impact of specific historical event current society. At Johns Hopkins, Fogel was guided and supervised on his doctoral dissertation by Simon Kuznets (Nobel Prize recipient 1971). Under the guidance of Kuznets, Fogel attempted to explain the economic impact of the development of railroads in the 19th century on the growth of American markets.
Fogel worked at Rochester University (early 1960s), the University of Chicago (1960s), and Harvard (1970s). In 1981, Fogel returned to the University of Chicago to replace George Stigler as the Charles R. Walgreen Professor of American Institutions.
His most famous and controversial work was Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, a 1974 two-volume quantitative study of American slavery co-written with Stanley Engelman. They argued that slavery had been a valuable industry for the economy and had collapsed because of political, rather than economic reasons. Fogel has also researched the effects of microeconomics on technological revolutions and modifications in the demographics of the national population and the labor force.
Fogel won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1993, along with Douglass Cecil North, “for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change." Fogel and North are acknowledged for their use of quantitative methods in analyzing history and life-cycles, and their development of cliometrics- the utilization of statistical data to understand economic history.
He is a winner of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He is now the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions and director of the Center for Population Economics (CPE) at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.
He is best known as a leading advocate of New economic history or cliometrics—the use of quantitative methods in history.
The Union Pacific Railroad: A Case in Premature Enterprise
Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History
Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery
Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery
Economic Growth, Population Theory and Physiology: The Bearings of Long-Term Processes on the Making of Economic Policy
