Peter F. Orazem has been on the faculty at Iowa State University since 1982 and currently serves as University Professor of Economics and Director of the Program for the Study of Midwest Markets and Entrepreneurship. He is a 1977 graduate in economics at the University of Kansas and received his Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1983.

He is a past member of the Ames City Council, the Ames Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Ames Economic Development Commission. In 2018, he served as a Fulbright Fellow at the Univerza na Primorskem in Slovenia.

His research deals with labor markets in the United States and in developing countries with a particular interest in human capital, regional economic development, and entrepreneurship.

Dr. Orazem organized the Society of Labor Economics sessions for the Midwest Economics Association meetings and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Development Effectiveness.

He is coauthor of chapters in the Handbook of Development Economics and the Handbook of Agricultural Economics and has served as a member of the core team for the World Bank’s 2007 World Development Report and wrote papers for the 2008, 2012 and post-2015 editions of the Copenhagen Consensus. He is co-editor of a book, Child Labor and Education in Latin America published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009. His research has appeared in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, The Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Finance, the International Economic Review, and numerous other outlets.