John Sessions graduated from the University of Southampton with a BSc Economics (First Class Honours), and was then awarded an MSc and PhD by the London School of Economics. He has worked at Loughborough University, Brunel University and the University of Bath in the UK. He has also held visiting positions at Cornell University, Dartmouth College, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the U.S., the Universite-Pantheon-Assas Paris II in France, and the University of Trier, in Germany.

Since 2018 he has been Professor of Economics - The Sir David Dale Chair at Newcastle University in the UK. He has been Head of Economics there since 2020.

He has published in Bulletin of Economic Research, Economics of Education Review, Economic Inquiry, Economic Journal, Economics Letters, Economic Record, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Journal of Economic Behaviour & Organization, Journal of Population Economics, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series A), Labour, Labour Economics, Manchester School, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Review of World Economics, Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Small Business Economics, Social Science & Medicine, and the Southern Economic Journal.

He was nominated for the University of Bath Mary Tasker Teaching Excellence Award (2003) and for the UK Economics Learning and Teaching Support Network Award (2003, 2004).

He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in September 2007.