J. David Richardson was born in Canada, raised in the United States, and educated at McGill University (B.A.) and the University of Michigan (Ph.D.). 

Since Fall 1991 he has been Professor of Economics (and International Relations, from Fall 1997) at Syracuse University, where Economics is a department in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.  From 1999-2006 he held a Gerald B. and Daphna Cramer Professorship of Global Affairs.  He is active in a number of multi-disciplinary activities at Maxwell and its Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs.  He is also one of the six faculty of Syracuse University’s Masters Degree Program in Social Sciences.

From 1970 to 1991 he was on the Economics faculty of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  He has also taught on a visiting basis at Wheaton College (Illinois), the University of Michigan, the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State, and in the Pew-Foundation-sponsored Faculty Summer Seminars in Christian Scholarship (at Calvin College) and Younger Scholars Program (at the University of Notre Dame).

He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington, D.C. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and a consultant to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Economic Council of Canada, the U.S. Export-Import Bank, the Ford and Pew Foundations, and Educational Testing Service.

He writes extensively on international trade policy and its effects.  He specializes in empirical research on trade under imperfect competition, on regional trade, and on trade and labor-market outcomes, with a focus on the United States.  He has authored two books, co-edited nine books, and written numerous other monographs, book chapters, and papers for professional journals.

During the early 1980s he co-directed the National Bureau of Economic Research team that examined U.S. trade policy while attempting to maintain regular communication with business, labor, and policy communities over research priorities and results.  This project was experimentally funded by the National Science Foundation.  More recently, his policy research has focused on globalization and on competition policies.  The first involves estimating the effects of U.S. export disincentives, of U.S. import dependence, and of trends in investment and outsourcing.  The second involves assessments of cross-country differences in competition policies and opportunities for their negotiated reconciliation.  These projects have been funded by several grants to the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

During the mid-1980s he directed the American Economic Association's Summer Minority Program.

He is married, with two daughters.  His wife Karen is employed as a full-time caregiver.  His daughter Kristin oversees the management of a number of retail outlets of Coach (leather accessories) near Boston, and is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Madison (Retail Management).  His daughter Laura (Conners) is a 5^th grade public school teacher in North Syracuse, a free-lance equitation instructor, a graduate of Syracuse University (B.A. in Psychology) and Le Moyne College (M.Ed. in elementary education)..  His son-in-law Kevin Conners is a New York State Trooper. 

He is an active Christian believer, and enjoys camping, riding (bikes and horses), and singing (tenor) in his leisure time.  For five years at North Syracuse Baptist Church, he and Karen coordinated the Precious Lambs, a Sunday class of persons with diverse abilities and disabilities.