Simon D. Halliday completed his PhD in economics at the University of Siena in Siena, Italy. Prior to that, he completed his Bachelor of Social Sciences, a Bachelor of Commerce (Honours), a Master of Commerce in Economics, and a Master of Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. 

Before joining the faculty at Bristol, Simon worked as an assitant professor at Smith College in Northampton, MA, USA, a lecturer in the Department of Economics at Royal Holloway, University of London, and prior to that as a lecturer in the School of Economics at the University of Cape Town. Before starting his graduate studies, Simon worked as the assistant project manager of a national survey of South African land reform, the Quality of Life Survey, a joint project of the South African Department of Land Affairs and the World Bank. 

Originally from Cape Town, South Africa, Simon's view of the world is deeply informed by having grown up in South Africa during a period in which it transitioned from apartheid state to post-apartheid democracy: contemporary South Africa cannot be properly understood without understanding its institutions and history. Living in and trying to understand South Africa is what drew Simon to studying economics: from evidence on other-regarding and endogenous preferences and how they help to explain cooperation and generosity alongside xenophobia and parochialism, to the role of contractual incompleteness between parties in exchange and how this helps us understand inequality, the exercise of power, and how norms and institutions affect economic outcomes. An undergraduate course in classical and evolutionay game theory opened Simon's eyes to the wide-ranging ways in which economics can be applied to the contemporary world. Combined with a later course on applied data analysis, these two interests cemented Simon's love of how economics marries application and theory.