Robert E. Wright

Robert E. Wright (born 1969 in Rochester, N.Y.) is a business, economic, financial, and monetary historian and the inaugural Rudy and Marilyn Nef Family Chair of Political Economy at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He is also a research economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Education and research

After graduating from Fairport High School in 1987, Wright took degrees in History from Buffalo State College, where he was a member of the All-College Honors Program, and the University at Buffalo (Ph.D., 1997). Since 2001, he has authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited twenty books on topics including banks and banking, book publishing, construction, corporations, corporate genealogy, and corporate governance, economic indicators, entrepreneurship, government bailouts, insurance, money and monetary policy, public debts, public policies, and securities markets

Wright's forthcoming books include a book on the role the real estate mortgage crisis of the 1760s played in the American Revolution.

Wright is a board member of Historians Against Slavery, an NGO. He edits its books series with Cambridge University Press, "Slaveries Since Emancipation," and serves on HAS's public speakers bureau. He is also associated with the Museum of American Finance.

Wright taught at New York University’s Stern School of Business from 2003 until 2009. Before that, Wright taught economics at the University of Virginia, where he worked with Virginia economist Ron Michener in a dispute against Grubb, an economist at the University of Delaware, over the nature of colonial and early U.S. money and monetary systems.