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. This VoxDev blog post discusses research on how ideas can affect policy, and how I advance our understanding of this topic in my job market paper.

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.