Jean-Laurent Rosenthal is trying to understand what institutions encourage long-term economic growth and wealth formation. He has studied changes in property rights at the time of the French Revolution, credit markets in Europe, law and the organization of enterprises (in France, Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom), and wealth inequality. Rosenthal is the author or co-author of several books including Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (with R. Bin Wong, Harvard University Press, 2011) and Dark Matter Credit: The Development of Peer-to-Peer Lending and Banking in France (with Philip T. Hoffman and Gilles Postel-Vinay, Princeton University Press, 2019).

Rosenthal holds a bachelor's degree in history from Reed College (1984) and a PhD in social science from Caltech (1988). His dissertation, which focused on why infrastructure investment was difficult under the old regime in France but was relatively easy after 1815, received the Milton and Francis Clauser Doctoral Prize from Caltech and the Alexander Gerschenkron Prize from the Economic History Association. From 1988 to 2006, he was a faculty member in the department of economics at UCLA. He was the co-editor of the Journal of Economic History (2010–2014). Rosenthal's honors include the Arthur H. Cole Prize for best article in the Journal of Economic History in 1991, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2001–2002), a Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences Fellowship (1993–1994), a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award (1992), and an Alfred P. Sloan Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (1987–1988).