Dr. Joshua Rosenbloom

Dr. Joshua L Rosenbloom

Position
  • Professor
I am a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts and an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Cliometric Society, and the Economic History Association. I served on the Advisory Committee for the Social, Behavioral and Economics Sciences at the National Science Foundation between November 2024 and its termination in early 2025.

My research interests include: U.S. economic history, the economics of science, technology and innovation, and labor economics. Between 1988 and 2015 I was a faculty member in the Department of Economics at the University of Kansas. In addition to my academic appointment at the University of Kansas, I served as Associate Vice Chancellor for Research & Graduate Studies (2006-2012), interim Dean of Graduate Studies (August 2011-January 2012), and Director of the Center for Business and Economic Analysis in the Institute for Policy & Social Research (2001-2006). In the period August 2012 - August 2014, I served as director of the U.S. National Science Foundation's Science of Science and Innovation (SciSIP) program.  In August 2015 I moved to Iowa State University to assume the role of Department Chair, a position I held through June 2025.

Area of Expertise

  • Economic History
  • Labor-Public Economics

Education

  • Ph.D., Economics, Stanford University, 1988
  • B.A., History, Oberlin College, 1981

Recent Working Papers

The Industrial Revolution in the United States: 1790-1870

What Explains Science’s Expanded Reliance On Postdoctoral Researchers?

Recent and Forthcoming Publications

The First Industrial Revolution and Global Divergence: Steam Power and Uneven Paths to Growth. Co-edited by Haris Kitsikopoulos and Joshua L. Rosenbloom. Springer (forthcoming 2026)

"Sharing Research Data: Researcher Behavior and Attitudes." Science and Public Policy.  Published online 8/25/2025. https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scaf041 .

Associated data can be accessed here: "Researcher Data Sharing: Behavior and Attitudes, 2018-2021"

“Wealth Mobility in the United States: 1860-1870,” with Brandon S. Dupont, Social Science History 46 (2022): pp. 801-29.   Open Access, available here https://doi.org/10.1017/ssh.2022.19

"The Economic History of North America, 1700-1870," Cambridge Economic History of the Modern World, vol. I, Steven Broadberry and Kyoji Fukao, eds. (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

"Colonial America," Handbook of Cliometrics, 2nd ed. Claude Diebolt and Michael Haupert, eds. (Springer Nature, Switzerland, 2019), pp. 785-810. Online publication, August 2018 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40458-0_60-1 [WP https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/entities/publication/4ece5872-a4f5-4311-b435-77d4680dadf7 ]