Hi I’m Eric, welcome to my site!

I am an Assistant Professor of Economics at Colgate University. I earned my doctorate in economics from the University of Virginia in May 2026.

My research lies at the intersection of development economics, political economy, and economic history. An overview of my job market paper and other research examining how ideas affect policy can be found at this VoxDev blog post.

In general, much of my work focuses on econometric analyses of novel data, either collected from the field, constructed from archival records, or imputed from text using natural language processing tools. I primarily examine settings which allow for causal inference from observational data.

You can contact me at erobertson@colgate.edu.