Professor Scott Gehlbach

Scott Gehlbach has been named the Elise and Jack Lipsey Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Harris School of Public Policy and the College.

Gehlbach is a scholar of authoritarian and post-authoritarian regimes. Much of his research is motivated by the contemporary and historical experience of Russia and Ukraine. His early work focused on the post-communist transition in these and neighboring countries—a period of enormous political and economic change that exposed the centrality of institutions and the often divergent effects of similar reforms. More recently, Gehlbach has examined the relationship between reform and rebellion in autocracies, with an empirical focus on late Imperial Russia, and the impact of political connections on economic outcomes using large firm-level datasets from Ukraine. An early and leading practitioner of the use of game theory to model the institutions of authoritarian regimes, Gehlbach is the author of the widely used textbook Formal Models of Domestic Politics, now in its second edition.

Gehlbach is currently first vice president of the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics, associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and organizer of the annual Summer Workshop in the Economic History and Historical Political Economy of Eurasia. At the University of Chicago, Gehlbach co-led the process to create a new Ph.D. Program in Political Economy, a joint offering of the Department of Political Science and the Harris School of Public Policy; he now leads the program as its director.

Gehlbach's appointment is among 17 faculty members who have received distinguished service professorships or named professorships at UChicago at this time.

Profs. Fernando Alvarez (the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics and the College, effective Jan. 2,), Diane Lauderdale (the Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences and the College), Jeffrey Matthews (the Dallas B. Phemister Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Surgery), Magne Mogstad (the Gary S. Becker Distinguished Service Professor in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics and the College), Mark Payne (the Chester D. Tripp Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Classics and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and the College), Douglas Skinner (the Sidney Davidson Distinguished Service Professor of Accounting), Marsha Rosner (the Charles B. Huggins Distinguished Service Professor in the Ben May Department for Cancer Research and the College), Matthew Tirrell (the D. Gale Johnson Distinguished Service Professor in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the College), and Everett Vokes (the John E. Ultmann Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Radiation and Cellular Oncology) have been named distinguished service professors.

Profs. Mark Anderson (the Paul and Allene Russell Professor in the Department of Medicine, effective Oct. 1, 2022), Leonardo Bursztyn (the Saieh Family Professor in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics and the College, effective Jan. 2), Guangbin Dong (the Weldon G. Brown Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the College), Kevin Hector (the Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor in the Divinity School and the College), Patrick Jagoda (the William Rainey Harper Professor in the Departments of English Language and Literature, Cinema and Media Studies, and Obstetrics and Gynecology and the College), Shabaana A. Khader (the Bernard and Betty Roizman Professor in the Department of Microbiology and the College), and Matthew Notowidigdo (the David McDaniel Keller Professor of Economics) have received named professorships alongside Gehlbach.

All appointments were effective Jan. 1, 2023, unless otherwise noted.

This article has been adapted from one which originally appeared at UChicago News.