List received his bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, and his Ph.D. from the University of Wyoming in 1996. He had his first teaching position at the University of Central Florida, and he then moved to the University of Arizona and the University of Maryland, College Park, where he still holds an adjunct position, before moving to Chicago. List also spends time at Tilburg University, where he is a distinguished visiting scholar and Resources for the Future, where he is a University Distinguished Scholar. From May 2002 to July 2003 he served as Senior Economist, President's Council of Economic Advisers. In 2011 List was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2015 he was elected Fellow of the Econometric Society and, according to RePEc, was the top ranked economist worldwide of the 40,000 economists who graduated in the last 20 years. As of March 2021, RePEc ranks him as the 9th most influential economist in the world.