Harold Demsetz


Harold Demsetz is a Professor of Economics at UCLA and one of the pioneers of New Institutional Economics. Demsetz was born in Chicago in 1930, and received a BA degree from the University of Illinois in 1953, MBA (1954) and Ph.D. (1959) degrees from Northwestern University. He chaired UCLA' s Department of Economics from 1978 through 1980. From 1984 to 1995, he held the Arthur Andersen UCLA Alumni Chair in Business Economics and Directed UCLA's Business Economics program. 

His works are focused on property rights, the business firm, problems in monopoly, competition, and antitrust. He has also published work on bioeconomics. The article he co-authored, Production, Information Costs, and Economic Organization, was selected by the American Economic Association as one of the 25 most important papers published in the 100 year history of the AER. The paper analyzes the firm as an economic entity and looks at relationships within and outside of the firm. His third book, The Economics of the Business Firm, has been translated into Spanish and Chinese. His most recent book is From Economic Man to Economic System, a collection of essays on human behavior and the institutions of capitalism. 

When assigned this alias, I was unaware of Demsetz. As his work is relatively young and specialized, it was not covered deeply in the past economic courses I have taken. I believe that his work is quite interesting, especially the research on business firms and property rights.

Sources: 

http://www.econ.ucla.edu/demsetz/

https://www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/honors-awards/distinguished-fellows/harold-demsetz


Comments

  1. Professor ArvanSeptember 7, 2017 at 5:19 PM

    He has written several papers with other economists at UCLA about the nature of the firm. We may cover some of that in class and/or have students teams work on those as course projects.

    ReplyDelete

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