Robert E. Evenson began his career as a farmer in southern Minnesota. After nine years on the land he embarked on an academic career, earning degrees at the University of Minnesota and the University of Chicago. Most of his academic career to date has been spent at Yale University, where he is a member of the Economic Growth Center and Director of the International and Development Economics program (and one of the few ex-farmers on the faculty). He has supervised and advised several hundred students at Yale, including many who now hold positions of leadership in many countries. He has also supervised more than fifty doctoral students and has worked with a similar number of post-doctoral students as well.

Robert Evenson's research career encompasses three fields. His most important work has been on the economics of agricultural growth. His dissertation was one of the early statistical studies of total factor productivity growth in U.S. agriculture. He has continued the study of U.S. agricultural growth, mostly in collaboration with Wallace Huffman. Their 1993 book, Science for Agriculture: A Long Term Perspective (Iowa State Press) is the product of a number of years of collaboration with Huffman.

Beginning with his first appointment at Yale in 1969, Robert Evenson shifted his attention to the growth process in developing countries. He has since pursued growth studies in many countries, often in collaboration with other economists. Studies of the sources of growth in developing countries now constitute a major body of research and have provided policy makers with evidence for high pay-off investments in research extension, schooling and related growth producing activities. Robert Evenson has been one of the major contributors to this field.

Robert Evenson began his second field of research on agricultural households while serving as Associate of the Agricultural Development Council and Visiting Professor of Agricultural Economics at the University of the Philippines in Los Banos from 1974 to 1977. He and colleagues initiated a household survey in Laguna province that has since been resurveyed eight times. This survey is one of the most detailed of its type and has served as the basis for more than a dozen master's thesis and doctoral dissertations.

Robert Evenson's third field of research on industrial technology and associated institutions (intellectual property rights and regulations) is an outgrowth of his first. Industrial R&D has contributed to agricultural productivity growth through spillover effects and most recent studies are taking this into account. And industrial productivity growth is an important part of the development process. Robert Evenson's pioneering work on the role of intellectual property rights and industrial R&D investments in developing countries has brought needed attention to this important topic.