Robert A. Margo, Distinguished Fellow 2026

Robert A. Margo has been a Professor of Economics at Boston University since 2005. He received his PhD from Harvard University and began his professorial career at the University of Pennsylvania before stints at Colgate University and Vanderbilt University. He is a Fellow of the Economic History Association and the Cliometric Society and a former President of the Economic History Association. He received the Provost’s Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award, one of BU’s highest honors.

As a pioneer in applying modern econometrics to the study of economic history, Margo has played a key role in the development of cliometrics while maintaining a well-deserved reputation for careful archival research. While he has important articles outside these areas, he has made key contributions to our understanding of US economic development in the 19th and early 20th centuries, education and the evolution of black-white disparities, and the mid-20th century wage structure. 

Margo’s landmark book, Wages and Labor Markets in the United States, 1820–1860, has been critical to our understanding of inequality in the 19th century.  Margo compiled a vast database of wages from the Reports of Persons and Articles Hired covering payments from the army to civilian employees. He supplemented these data with information from the 1850 and 1860 Censuses of Social Statistics on local average wages by occupation and the local cost of living. His analysis illuminates the evolution of real and nominal wages across geography and over time. Importantly, during the years of America’s first industrial revolution and enormous land expansion, wages kept pace with GDP per worker but with considerable regional variation and an increase in the skill premium. The book advances our understanding of economic growth in an emerging economy. The work laid the foundation for research on the long-run evolution of US wage inequality and provided wage data used in many fields of economics. With Claudia Goldin, he pioneered research on inequality reduction in the mid-20th century, which they termed the Great Compression. Margo has also shown how historical racial disparities in educational access and school resources have contributed to US racial inequality. His early work on Black education in the post-bellum South demonstrated large reductions in public expenditures on Black children and how diminished access to quality schooling set back the hopes of freedom.

The American Economic Association turned to Margo when it looked for someone to write a history of the American Economic Review for its 100th volume. In his deeply analytical article, he showed how, following World War II, the journal transformed from one that filled disparate roles to one that became increasingly specialized as demand for space for research articles increased. Book reviews shifted from the AER to the newly created Journal of Economic Literature. Various committee reports shifted to the AER Papers and Proceedings. The number and size of issues increased, while the acceptance rate fell, and after 1980, paper lengths increased. 

Margo has served on the American Economic Association Nominating Committee and as chair of the Boston University Economics Department. He was also the editor of Explorations in Economic History. A gifted musician, he is an elected non-presidential fellow of the Classical Mandolin Society of America and has published prodigiously in the Mandolin Journal.