Mark Harrison is a research fellow and a former national fellow (2008–9) at the Hoover Institution. He is an economic historian and specialist in Soviet affairs, currently affiliated with the Hoover Sino-Soviet Workshop led by Hoover research fellow Paul R. Gregory.

In addition to his Hoover appointment, Harrison is a professor of economics at the University of Warwick in England and a senior research fellow at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies of the University of Birmingham. He edits the Political Economy Research in Soviet Archives (PERSA) working papers at www.warwick.ac.uk/go/persa. Harrison was one of the first Western economists to work in the Russian archives following the fall of Soviet communism. His work has brought new knowledge about the Russian and Soviet economy into mainstream economics and international economic history, especially through projects on the two world wars.

Harrison has written or edited a number of books including Guns and Rubles: The Defense Industry in the Stalinist State, published in 2008 in the Yale-Hoover series on Stalin, Stalinism, and the Cold War; The Economics of World War I (Cambridge University Press, 2005); and The Economics of World War II (Cambridge University Press, 1998). His articles have appeared in leading journals of comparative economics, economic history, and Russian studies. Harrison was the winner of the National Award for Applied Economics (2012). He received the Alec Nove Prize from the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies for his book Accounting for War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defence Burden, 1940-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

He has a BA in economics and politics from Cambridge University and a DPhil in modern history from Oxford University.