Leandro Prados de la Escosura is an Emeritus Professor of Economic History at Carlos III University, Madrid, Spain, and a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), London, UK. Previously, he has taught at Georgetown University (Prince of Asturias Professor), USA, and the University of California, San Diego, USA. He is currently Fundación Rafael del Pino Chair and has been the Honorary Maddison Chair, University of Groningen, the Netherlands, Leverhulme Professor at the London School of Economics (LSE), United Kingdom, and Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford UK, and the LSE, and a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy.
Prados de la Escosura served as President of the European Historical Economics Society (EHES) and as a Trustee of the Cliometric Society and EHES. He belonged to the Executive Committee of the International Economic History Association. He is an editor of the Economic History Review and a member of the Advisory Board of Cliometrica, the European Review of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History, and the Scandinavian Economic History Review. He is a former editor of Revista de Historia Económica/ Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History and a former associate editor of the Journal of Economic Surveys.
He is the author of Human Development and the Path to Freedom (2022, Cambridge University Press), Spanish Economic Growth, 1850-2015 (2017, Palgrave MacMillan), and the editor of Exceptionalism and Industrialisation: Britain and its European Rivals, 1688–1815 (2004, Cambridge University Press). His current research interests are economic freedom and well-being in a historical perspective and economic change and inequality in Spain in the very long run.