Konstantin Sonin is a professor in the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago and a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). Previously, he was a professor of Economics and a vice-rector at the Higher School of Economics, one of the largest universities in Russia, and before that a professor and vice rector at the New Economic School in Moscow. He was a founding director of the joint HSE-NES Bachelor of Arts Program, and chairs the academic council of the program.

Sonin received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Moscow State University, and has since been a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard in 2000–01, a visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2004-2005, and a visiting professor at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, in 2009-10. His research interests include political economics, transition and development, economic institutions, and economics of media. Sonin's papers have appeared in leading academic journals in economics and political science. For many years, he has written a fortnightly column in Vedomosti, the leading Russian business daily, which also appears in English in The Moscow Times. He is a frequent contributor to Russian printed and electronic media, and a prominent blogger on economic and political matters.

Selected publications

"Political Selection and the Persistence of Bad Government," with Daron Acemoglu and Georgy Egorov, Quarterly Journal of Economics 125(4), 2010: 1511-1575.

"Dictators and Their Viziers: Endogenizing the Loyalty-Competence Trade-off," with Georgy Egorov, Journal of European Economic Association 9(5), 2010: 903–930.

"Field Experiment Estimate of Electoral Fraud in Russian Parliamentary Elections," with Ruben Enikolopov, Vassily Korovkin, Maria Petrova, and Alexei Zakharov, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110(2), 2013: 448-452.