Harold Demsetz

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Harold Demsetz (born 1930, Chicago, Illinois) is a professor emeritus of economics at UCLA.

1 Career
2 Ideas
3 Major publications
4 External links

[edit] Career

Demsetz (1988) contains an autobiographical essay.

Demsetz grew up in Chicago, and was awarded B.A. from the University of Illinois in 1953, and an MBA (1954) and a Ph.D. (1959) from Northwestern University. He taught at the University of Michigan in 1958-59, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), 1959-63, and the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago, 1963-71. In 1971, he returned permanently to UCLA's Economics Department, which he chaired 1978-80. He held the Arthur Andersen UCLA Alumni Chair in Business Economics, 1984-95.

Demsetz is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Director of the Mont Pelerin Society, and a past (1996) President of the Western Economics Association.

[edit] Ideas

Demsetz belongs to the Chicago school of economic theory, and is a pioneer of law and economics and of modern managerial economics. Demsetz's research has focused on property rights, the nature of the business firm, industrial organization, antitrust policy, and business regulation.

He invented Emissions trading as a way to decrease pollution by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of pollutants.

He formulated Nirvana-Vorwurf as an alternative to the theory of Perfect competition.

[edit] Major publications

"Toward a Theory of Property Rights", 1967, AER
"Why Regulate Utilities?", 1968, J Law Econ
"Information and Efficiency: another viewpoint", 1969, J Law Econ
"Production, Information Costs and Economic Organization", with A. Alchian, 1972, AER
"Industry Structure, Market Rivalry and Public Policy", 1973, J Law Econ
"Accounting for Advertising as a Barrier to Entry", 1979, J of Business
Economic, legal, and political dimensions of competition, 1982.
The organization of economic activity, 1988.
Anti-trust economics : new challenges for competition policy (with Alexis Jacquemin), 1994.
The economics of the business firm : seven critical commentaries, 1995.
"The Primacy of Economics: An Explanation of the Comparative Success of Economics in the Social Sciences" (Presidential Address to the Western Economics Association), 1997, Economic Inquiry