Robert William Fogel (born July 1, 1926 in New York City) is an economist at the United States.
He entered Cornell University and received his BA in 1948, M.A. in 1960 from Columbia University, and Ph.D. from John Hopkins University in 1963.


At Cornell University Fogel interested in the correlation between history and economics. He started to use quantitative methods to answer questions involving economic impact on specific historical events of a society. At Johns Hopkins University, Fogel guided by Simon Kuznets (Nobel Economics Prize winner 1971) in working on the dissertation. With the guidance Kuznets, Fogel tried to explain the impact of economic growth on the railways in the 19th century when the markets in the United States develops.


Fogel worked at the University of Rochester (the early 1960s), University of Chicago (1960), and Harvard University (1970). In 1981, Fogel returned to the University of Chicago to replace George Stigler as Professor Charles R. Walgreen in American Institutions.


And his famous controversy is the Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, a quantitative study of American slavery two volumes published in 1974 which he wrote with Stanley Engelman. They argued that slavery had become valuable to the economy and industry have fallen for political reasons rather than economic. Fogel also has researched the micro-economic revolution and technological modifications in the national population demographics and labor force.


Fogel won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1993, along with Douglass Cecil North, "for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods to explain economic and institutional changes." Fogel and North hailed the use of quantitative methods in analyzing the history and life cycle, and their development in kliometri-use statistical data to understand economic history.