Donald R. Davis is the Ragnar Nurkse Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Columbia University. He did his undergraduate work on social and ethical philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley and received his PhD in Economics from Columbia. He was on the faculty at Harvard University from 1992-1999. He has served as Chairman of the Department of Economics at Columbia. He has served on various editorial boards. He is a Past President of the Urban Economics Association.

Davis’s research spans various topics in spatial economics, from international trade to economic geography, regional economics to urban economics. His work has touched on testing of trade theories; the advantages of market scale in international trade; trade and inequality; and more recently on the distribution of skills across cities of different size; and the segregation of consumption by race and ethnicity within cities.