Chas Cadwell

A lawyer with 30 years’ work experience in economic reform, deregulation, research oversight, and non-profit leadership in the US and in developing countries, Mr. Cadwell joined the Urban Institute (UI) in May 2007. His work targets governance reform, aid effectiveness, and integrating research and policy reform.

From 1990-2006 Mr. Cadwell was Director of the IRIS Center in the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park. IRIS conducted research on economic development and reform in developing countries and worked with reform leaders in more than 70 countries to understand and improve governance and economic policies. Mr. Cadwell worked with IRIS founder, Professor Mancur Olson, to launch and build the IRIS center. Following Olson’s death in 1998, the University made Mr. Cadwell Principal Investigator at the IRIS Center. In 2001 he received the University’s Distinguished International Service award.

Throughout his career Mr. Cadwell has assembled teams of economists, lawyers, and others to advance the understanding of how institutions of property rights and contract enforcement contribute to economic growth, and the nature of the incentives of various forms of government to produce these and other market-augmenting public goods. He has overseen teams working in dozens of countries to develop the research capability of local institutions, analyze policy options, and advance specific reforms. Mr. Cadwell’s work has included assistance in the development of civil codes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and regulatory simplification, decentralization, and local government reform in places such as Egypt, Indonesia, Nepal, Romania, and Russia. In Bangladesh he worked on reforms in both the district courts and the Supreme Court that increased accountability and transparency of judicial actions. For the European Commission he developed benchmarks of commercial legal reform in six Arab states with which the EU has trade agreements. At IRIS he launched the IRIS Index research program on institutions and growth. For USAID he has designed training for economists; reviewed various assessments and indexes for their practical utility; and advised on policies related to fragile states, civil society development, and the political economy of reform. For the World Bank, Mr. Cadwell has overseen assessments of work on water and sanitation, social capital, measurement of corruption, and development of institutional assessment methods.

Mr. Cadwell’s publications include Market-Augmenting Government, edited with Omar Azfar (University of Michigan Press, 2003) and numerous book chapters, presentations, and speeches.

Cadwell is a graduate of Yale College (1973) and the National Law Center at The George Washington University (1977). He has worked in the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, the Office of Advocacy at the US Small Business Administration, in private law practice, and – in the pre-Internet era – in the export information business. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife and two school-aged daughters.

Areas of Expertise: Aid effectiveness; governance reform and political economy in developing countries; anti-corruption; the role of think tanks in reform; courts and regulatory systems; measuring institutions and reform; civil society/government interactions; and private sector development

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