Christopher Woodruff is Professor of Development Economics and a Fellow at Wolfson College at the University of Oxford.

He is the Scientific Coordinator for the DFID – CEPR joint research venture on Private Enterprise Development in Low Income Countries (PEDL) and directs the Firm Capabilities group at the International Growth Centre. In addition to his position at Oxford, Professor Woodruff is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), and a Senior Fellow of the Bureau of Research on Economic Analysis and Development (BREAD), a Research Fellow at the Center for Competitive Advantage and the Global Economy (CAGE) and the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). 

A leading expert on enterprises in developing countries, Professor Woodruff is a pioneer in the use of field experiments in understanding enterprise dynamics in developing countries. His recent work includes measurement of rates of return to capital investments in microenterprises, the effect of formal registration on enterprise performance, the use of business plan competitions to identify small enterprises with potential for rapid growth, and the use of temporary wage subsidies to understand the willingness of microenterprises to expand employment. His previous work examined the ability of informal contracting and private institutions such as trade associations to govern trading relations in the absence of functioning state institutions. Geographically, his research spans a broad area of the developing world -­ Mexico, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Ghana and Eastern Europe.