Elias Papaioannou is a Professor of Economics at the London Business School, where he co-directs the Wheeler Institute for Business and Development. Elias, a Fellow of the British Academy, serves as a Managing Co-Editor of the Review of Economic Studies.

He holds an LL.B. from the Law School of the National Kapodistrian University of Athens, a Master's in Public Administration (MPA) from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the London Business School. After completing his doctorate in 2005, he worked for two years at the Financial Research Division of the European Central Bank. From 2007 to 2012, he worked as an Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College. Between 2010 and 2012, he served as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at Harvard University, and in 2019-2020, he was the Hal Varian Visiting Professor at MIT's Department of Economics.

His research covers international finance, political economy, economic history, growth, and development. He has published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including Nature, Econometrica, the Review of Economic Studies, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, and the Journal of Finance. His research has been recognized with the 2013 European Investment Bank Young Economist Award, the 2005 Young Economist Award from the European Economic Association, and the 2008 Austin Robinson Memorial Prize from the Royal Economic Society for the best paper published in the Economic Journal. In 2018, Elias received a European Research Council (ERC) consolidator grant for research on African economic history.