Professor Robert (Bob) Gregory is undoubtedly one of Australia’s pre-eminent economists. He has earned an international reputation for his significant contributions to the development of theory and empirical methodology in a variety of fields of economics. At the same time in the past 20 years he has been the most influential academic economist in public policy-making in Australia, and has led what during his time as Head of Department has become one of the top Economics Departments in the country.

Bob Gregory began his career in economics at University of Melbourne graduating with a B.Com. with 1st class Honours in Economics in 1961. In 1967 he received his PhD from the London School of Economics. He commenced at the Department of Economics at the Research School of Social Sciences at ANU in 1969, was made a Professor in 1981, and has been Head of Department since 1987.

Professor Gregory has made many important contributions to international knowledge in economics. His 1976 paper on effects of mineral booms was seen as a major development in explaining a country’s macroeconomic performance following such an event, and has become known as the ‘Gregory effect’; and his work on wage determination in the early 1980s is credited with beginning research on ‘insider-outsider’ effects in wage-setting which became a major international research topic in the 1980s and 1990s. Professor Gregory’s empirical research has been highly innovative and introduced new methods to labour economics. His work on effects of equal pay case decisions in Australia using micro-level data from Australia, the United States and United Kingdom can be seen to be the forerunner of both cross-country and natural experiment research methodologies in labour economics, both of which are now very widely applied. Over the past 30 years Professor Gregory has been at the forefront of virtually every development in the study of Australian labour markets. On a wide range of topics - such as the origins of mass unemployment, changes to the composition of employment, increases in earnings inequality, and the role of neighbourhood effects in social inequality – his work has been seminal, initiating a large body of work by other researchers and attention from governments.

Professor Gregory has made major contributions to the development of economic policy in Australia. From 1985-95 he was a member of the Board of the Reserve Bank of Australia, and from 1986-91 he was a member of the Australian Sciences and Technology Council. Professor Gregory was a member of the Commonwealth Committee on Higher Education Funding that in the late 1980s recommended the introduction of an income-contingent loan system for higher education. Through the early 1990s he was Principal Consultant to a series of reviews of aged care and nursing home funding undertaken by the Commonwealth Department of Community Services and Health. And in the mid-1990s Professor Gregory was a member of the Commonwealth Taskforce on Employment Opportunities whose report was the basis for the Working Nation program.

Professor Gregory is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (1979), and has been nominated the Economic Society of Australia Distinguished Fellow (2001). In 1983-84 he held the Chair in Australian Studies at Harvard University. In 1996 Professor Gregory was awarded the Order of Australia Medal.

Outside of his time at ANU, Professor Gregory has also held positions as Visiting Professor at Northwestern University and University of Chicago, as a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington D.C., and at the Industries Assistance Commission. He has been President of the Economic Society of Australia (1997-99), and Editor of the Economic Record, the leading Australian economics journal, as well as serving on Editorial Boards of numerous international journals.