Stephen Haber is the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and A.A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford.  His two most recent books are Political Institutions and Financial Development, edited with Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast (Stanford University Press, 2008), and Mexico Since 1980, coauthored with Herbert Klein, Noel Maurer, and Kevin Middlebrook (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Professor Haber’s research focuses on the relationship between political institutions and economic growth, and he brings a broad range of disciplines to bear on his investigations.  He received his B.A. in international affairs with distinction from The George Washington University in 1979, his M.A. in history from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1981, and his Ph.D. in history from UCLA in 1985.  He joined the Stanford faculty in 1987.  He became a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution in 2001 and the Milligan Professor at Stanford in 2003.  He has twice won the Dean’s Distinguished Teaching Award and in 2009 was awarded Stanford’s Allan V. Cox Medal for Faculty Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research. 

In addition to his positions at Hoover and Stanford, Professor Haber is a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Center for International Development, and a research economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research. 

Much of Professor Haber’s research involves Latin America.  His book Mexico Since 1980, part of a new series examining politics, economics, and social change in important countries and regions since the mid-1980s, asks two interdisciplinary questions that are central to understanding the country’s urgent current challenges: Why did the opening of the Mexican economy to foreign trade and investment not lead to sustained economic growth?  And why has electoral democracy in Mexico not produced a regime marked by the rule of law?

Professor Haber’s Political Institutions and Financial Development asks a more general question.  Economists have long maintained that a well-functioning financial system is necessary to economic growth and have observed that countries with robust banking sectors and securities markets are more prosperous than those in which access to these systems is restricted to a favored elite.  But why do some countries develop better financial systems than others?  The volume uses insights from political science, economics, and history to cast new light on this critical issue.