Christopher Woodruff

An early area of Woodruff's research has been the role of institutions such as rule of law and property rights in transition countries. For instance, together with John McMillan, Woodruff finds that Vietnamese firms in the 1990s were more likely to give a customer credit the more limited the customer's access to alternative credit suppliers, the longer the duration of their trading relationship and the more information it had gathered about the customer beforehand, and the better the customer is linked to business networks. Moreover, in the absence of reliable legal enforcement, firms often agree to renegotiate contracts following a breach, implying that retaliation is not as forceful as predicted in repeated games models and not as effective as sanctions, even though community sanctions are occasionally invoked.

Together with Simon Johnson and Daniel Kaufmann, Woodruff and McMillan also explore the legal system in post-communist countries. Comparing post-communist Russia and Ukraine to Poland, Slovakia and Romania, they find the size of 'unofficial' activity to be much larger in the former two than in the latter three, mostly due to higher effective tax rates, worse bureaucratic corruption, grater incidence of mafia protection, and less trust in the court system; the central role of entrepreneurs in transition economies is further explored by Woodruff and McMillan in a JEP article. Overall, Woodruff, Johnson and McMillan argue that weak property rights rather than insufficient access to finance were the main binding constraint for private sector investment into post-communist countries in the 1990s, as weak property rights discourage entrepreneurs from reinvesting their profits. Similarly, they also demonstrate the importance of trust into well-functioning courts for investment: while relationships can sustain existing interactions, workable courts support the creation of new business relationships.

Christopher Woodruff earned a B.A. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1980, followed by a M.A. in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1984. In parallel, from 1981 to early 1987, Woodruff worked as economist and manager of financial planning of the Central Power and Light Company in Corpus Christi, Texas. In 1994, he earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Texas at Austin with a thesis on specific investments and industry location in Mexico under Dale O. Stahl, after which he took up a position as assistant professor at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies of the University of California at San Diego, where he was promoted to associate professor and finally to full professor in 2002 and 2009, respectively. In 2009, Woodruff moved to the University of Warwick, before becoming a Professor of Developing Economics at the University of Oxford in 2016. Moreover, Woodruff has been a co-director of the International Growth Centre's Programme on Firm Capabilities since 2009 and has acted as scientific coordinator of the DFID-CEPR Research Programme on Private Enterprise Development in Low-Income Countries. Additionally, Woodruff is affiliated with the NBER, Centre for Competitive Advantage and the Global Economy (CAGE), Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), CEPR, and IZA. In terms of professional service, Woodruff has performed editorial duties for the Journal of Development Economics, World Bank Economic Review, Journal of African Economies, the B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy, and the Journal of Comparative Economics.

Christopher Woodruff (born in 1959) is an American economist and Professor of Development Economics at Oxford University.