Public Policy Analysis Challenge

Dr. John R. Lott, Jr. is an economist and a world-recognized expert on guns and crime. He is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. During the Trump administration, he served as the Senior Advisor for Research and Statistics in the U.S. Department of Justice. Lott has held research or teaching positions at various academic institutions including the University of Chicago, Yale University, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, UCLA, and Rice University, and was the chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission during 1988-1989. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA.

Nobel laureate Milton Friedman noted: “John Lott has few equals as a perceptive analyst of controversial public policy issues.”

Lott is a prolific author for both academic and popular publications. He has published over 100 articles in peer-reviewed academic journals and written ten books, including More Guns, Less Crime, The Bias Against Guns, and Freedomnomics. His most recent books are Dumbing Down the Courts: How politics keeps the smartest judges off the bench and Gun Control Myths.

He has been one of the most productive and cited economists in the world (from 1969 to 2000 he ranked 26th worldwide in terms of quality-adjusted total academic journal output, 4th in terms of total research output, and 86th in terms of citations). Among economics, business, and law professors his research is currently the 14th most downloaded in the world. He is also a frequent writer of op-eds.