Christopher Cotton is Professor of Economics and the Jarislowsky-Deutsch Chair in Economic and Financial Policy at Queen’s University, where he directs the John Deutsch Institute for the Study of Economic Policy. At Queen’s he also holds cross-appointments in the School of Policy Studies and the Department of Medicine, and teaches across economics, policy, and the Smith School of Business. Dr. Cotton served as Director of Research at Limestone Analytics from 2017 to 2022, helping grow the firm from a start-up to an international evaluation firm. Today, he is a member of the board of directors and Senior Research Advisor.
He has published in Science, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, and other leading journals. His areas of expertise include education and human capital development, public health, and funding and evidence systems, including the role of AI in these spaces. His Science article introduced Policy Evidence Readiness Levels (PERLs), a framework for assessing how mature the evidence behind a policy or program is and whether it is ready to guide policy and funding decisions. Other work examines evidence and evaluation within organizations, uses field experiments to identify the challenges facing marginalized populations, and uses remote sensing and weather data to study how students and workers respond to environmental and economic shocks.
With Limestone, he led the evaluation of the IGATE-T Girls’ Education Challenge project in Zimbabwe for the UK FCDO, led the design and delivery of USAID’s Funding the Future education finance training program, led the firm’s COVID-19 economic projections for governments, and advised or led other projects for the WHO, UNICEF, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, Nutrition International, and World Vision. He also co-created the Certificate in Professional Impact Analysis, now offered through Queen’s Smith School of Business, and served as administrative director of the Canadian Economic Association’s Public Economics Group (CPEG). During the COVID-19 pandemic, he was the economic modeling lead for the Canada Digital Technology Supercluster’s Looking Glass project, an academic-industry partnership that included Limestone, co-founded and directed the federally funded One Society Network for Emerging Infectious Disease Modeling, linking economic and epidemiological modeling, and he served on the Royal Society of Canada’s working group on economic recovery.
Join us this International Development Week to learn about scenario planning as a tool to navigate uncertainty in international development, and how scenario planning can be used in planning for […]
According to Limestone’s latest modeling, a more-intense early-year lockdown may be less costly for the Canadian economy in the long run. Limestone’s STUDIO model, which provides rapid-response policy analysis to […]
