Roland Bénabou joined the faculty of Princeton University in 1999 and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Economics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Bénabou’s research spans both macroeconomic and microeconomic areas, such as the interplay of inflation and imperfect competition, or speculation and manipulation in financial markets. His recent work lies in three main areas. The first links inequality, growth, social mobility and the political economy of redistribution. The second centers on education, social interactions and the socioeconomic structure of cities. The third is that of economics and psychology ("behavioral economics"). It focuses in particular on extrinsic incentives versus intrinsic motivation, on the determinants of prosocial behavior and on motivated beliefs, both individual (overconfidence, wishful thinking, identity) and collective (groupthink, market manias, ideology, religion).

Bénabou is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow of the Center for Economic Policy Research, a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Institute for the Study of Labor, a Senior Fellow of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, and a member of the Behavioral Economics Roundtable. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study and a Guggenheim Fellow. He has served or currently serves on the editorial board of numerous journals such as the Review of Economic Studies, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Economic Growth and the Journal of the European Economic Association. Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.