Robert J. Brent is Professor of Economics Emeritus at Fordham University in New York specializing in Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA).
He has been at Fordham since 1980, except for periods of leave. He has also lived and worked at Universities in the US, UK and Africa, and was Coordinator of the Strategic Planning and Governance Program at the Asian Development Bank Institute in Tokyo in 1998. He had a Fulbright Scholar Award in 2003 to carry out CBAs of HIV/AIDS Prevention Programs in Tanzania. In 2010 – 2011, he chaired the European Union’s Scientific Committee related to EU Cohesion Policy. In 2011, he was a participant of the Copenhagen Consensus Project on HIV/AIDS and was commissioned to write the Guidelines for CBAs of social projects at the Inter-American Development Bank. He has written six textbooks on CBA, edited a seventh, and published articles on every area of CBA, covering applications in both Developed and Developing countries. His published evaluations on HIV/AIDS interventions relate to female education, ARVs, VCT, condoms and HIV stigma.
Recently, he has concentrated on evaluating dementia interventions. His published evaluations related to dementia symptoms interventions, cover education, Medicare eligibility, hearing aids, corrective lenses, and nursing homes. These five evaluations, together with ones related to elder abuse and human rights, are included in his 2022 book: Cost-Benefit Analysis and Dementia: New Interventions. His 2023 publications were on: FDA-approved medications; use of distributional weights in CBA; and explaining why CBA should always be used rather than Cost-Effectiveness Analysis. He is currently working on evaluations of dementia medicines. His 2024 publications, so far, are on evaluations of FDA approved medications for dementia, and beta-blockers. He is the main representative of the International Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse (INPEA) at the United Nations.