Rate My Professor Laurent Bouton

Laurent Bouton is a Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at Georgetown University, where he also serves as Director of the Georgetown Center for Economic Research. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the European Centre for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics (ECARES) at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 2009. Before joining Georgetown in 2013, Bouton was an Assistant Professor at Boston University. He has held visiting faculty positions at MIT and Harvard University, and maintains affiliations as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Research Affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, FNRS Research Associate at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, co-director of the DC Political Economy Center, and co-director of the UPPER network.

Bouton's research focuses on political economy, microeconomics, and public economics, particularly examining voter incentives under various electoral systems, information aggregation properties of elections, and outcomes in settings with multiple alternatives such as candidates, parties, or policies. His work addresses how fragmented information sources in modern elections influence results despite voter consensus on ideal outcomes with complete data. He has published extensively in leading journals, including 'Electoral Systems and Inequalities in Government Interventions' (Journal of the European Economic Association, 2021, with Garance Genicot and Micael Castanheira), 'The Tyranny of the Single-Minded: Guns, Environment, and Abortion' (Review of Economics and Statistics, 2021, with Paola Conconi, Francisco Pino, and Maurizio Zanardi), 'Run-off Elections in the Laboratory' (The Economic Journal, 2022, with Jorge Gallego, Aniol Llorente-Saguer, and Rebecca Morton), 'Voting Rights, Agenda Control and Information Aggregation' (Journal of the European Economic Association, 2024, with Aniol Llorente-Saguer, Antonin Macé, and Dimitrios Xefteris), and 'A Theory of Small Campaign Contributions' (The Economic Journal, 2024, with Micael Castanheira and Allan Drazen). In recognition of his contributions, Bouton was named Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor by Georgetown University. His scholarship ranks him among the top 5% of economists by recursive impact factors and journal pages.