Bruce M. Owen

Last updated

Bruce M. Owen
Bruce owen photo.jpg
Born (1943-10-13) October 13, 1943 (age 80)
Worcester, Massachusetts
NationalityAmerican
OccupationEconomist
Known forDeregulation of AT&T

Bruce M. Owen (born October 13, 1943, in Worcester, Massachusetts) is an economist and author. [1] Owen is the Morris M. Doyle Professor in Public Policy, Emeritus, in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, and the Gordon Cain Senior Fellow, Emeritus, in Stanford's Institute for Economic Policy Research. [2]

Contents

Early life and education

Owen graduated with a BA from Williams College in 1965, where he was a merit scholar, and subsequently earned his PhD in Economics from Stanford University in 1970. At Stanford, Owen was a Woodrow Wilson fellow, National Defense Education Act Title IV fellow, and Brookings Institution Economic Policy fellow. [3]

Career

Owen acted as chief economist in the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy in 1971 before returning to Stanford University in 1973 to serve as assistant professor of economics. [4] From 1974 to 1975, Owen was a Hoover Institution national fellow.

In 1978, Owen moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he briefly taught at Duke University as associate professor of business and law. During this time, Owen was an Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies fellow and chairman of the task force on the future of the United States Postal Service. [5]

In 1979, Owen became chief economist of the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice, where he played a key role in the ultimate deregulation of AT&T. [6] During the landmark trial of the breakup of AT&T (American Telephone & Telegraph), Owen testified as the Chief Economist of the US Justice Department. He presented compelling economic analysis that AT&T was in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The outcome of the trial was that AT&T was indeed a monopoly and Judge Greene ordered that AT&T therefore must allow competitors into the communication industry. From that point on, the prices of telecommunications fell, not only for governments and businesses, but for the average telephone user around the world.

Owen entered the private sector with the 1981 co-founding of Economists Incorporated, a consulting firm. He served as president and chairman of the board of the company until his retirement in 2003. During this time, Owen also taught an undergraduate seminar on economic analysis of law at Stanford's Washington, D.C. campus from 1989 to 2002. [7] Economists Incorporated is now a division of Secretariate.

Owen served as the Gordon Cain Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) from 2003 - 2015 and as the Morris M. Doyle Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Public Policy Program at Stanford from 2005 - 2015. He proposed and oversaw the addition of a Masters degree offering in the program.

Owen is a member of the American Economic Association, the Econometric Society, the American Law and Economics Association, an associate of the American Bar Association, and a consultant to the World Bank.

Books

Personal life

Owen is married to Josetta Owen and has two adult children, Bradford Kelly (born 1974), and Peter Brandon (born 1969).

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hoover Institution</span> American political think tank (established 1919)

The Hoover Institution is an American public policy think tank which promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government. While the institution is formally a unit of Stanford University, it maintains an independent board of overseers and relies on its own income and donations. It is widely described as conservative, although its directors have contested the idea that it is partisan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alfred E. Kahn</span> American economist (1917–2010)

Alfred Edward Kahn was an American economist and political advisor who specialized in regulation and deregulation. He was an important influence in the deregulation of the airline and energy industries. Commonly known as the "Father of Airline Deregulation," he chaired the Civil Aeronautics Board during the period when it ended its regulation of the airline industry, paving the way for low-cost airlines, from People Express to Southwest Airlines.

Anita Arrow Summers was an American educator of public policy, management, real estate and education and was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Bruce L. Benson is an American academic economist who is recognized as an authority on law and economics and a major exponent of anarcho-capitalist legal theory. He is chair of the department of economics, DeVoe L. Moore Professor, distinguished research professor and courtesy professor of law at Florida State University and the recipient of the 2006 Adam Smith Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Association of Private Enterprise Education. He is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and has recently been a Fulbright Senior Specialist in the Czech Republic, visiting professor at the university de Paris Pantheonon Assas, a Property-and-Environment-Research-Center Julian Simon Fellow, and visiting research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.

Robert Butler "Bob" Wilson, Jr. is an American economist and the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus at Stanford University. He was jointly awarded the 2020 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with his Stanford colleague and former student Paul R. Milgrom, "for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats". Two more of his students, Alvin E. Roth and Bengt Holmström, are also Nobel Laureates in their own right.

Frederic Michael Scherer is an American economist and expert on industrial organization. Since 2006, he continues as a professor of economics at the JFK School of Government at Harvard University.

Franklin Marvin Fisher was an American economist. He taught economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1960 to 2004.

Aaron S. Edlin is an American economist and lawyer specializing in antitrust and competition policy. In 1997–1998, he served in the Clinton White House as Senior Economist within the Council of Economic Advisers focusing on the areas of industrial organization, regulation and antitrust. In 1999, he co-founded the Berkeley Electronic Press, an electronic publishing company that assists with scholarly communication.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Hazlett</span> American economist (born 1952)

Thomas W. Hazlett is the Hugh H. Macaulay Endowed Professor of Economics in the John E. Walker Department of Economics at Clemson University where he also directs the Information Economy Project.

John Robert Meyer was an American economist and educator. Meyer is credited with creating the field of transport economics and was one of the pioneers of cliometrics.

David Mark Kennet is an independent economic consultant. He has previously been on the faculties of three universities and written a number of professional journal articles and has authored or co-authored two books.

Nicholas Economides is an internationally recognized academic authority on network economics, electronic commerce and public policy. His fields of specialization and research include the economics of networks, especially of telecommunications, computers, and information, the economics of technical compatibility and standardization, industrial organization, the structure and organization of financial markets and payment systems, antitrust, application of public policy to network industries, strategic analysis of markets and law and economics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul A. David</span> American economist (1935–2023)

Paul Allan David was an American academic economist, noted for his work on the economics of scientific progress and technical change. He was also well-known for his work in American economic history and in demographic economics.

Masahiko Aoki was a Japanese economist, Tomoye and Henri Takahashi Professor Emeritus of Japanese Studies in the Economics Department, and Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Aoki was known for his work in comparative institutional analysis, corporate governance, the theory of the firm, and comparative East Asian development.

Ronald Ian McKinnon was an applied economist. His primary interests were international economics and economic development, with strong secondary interests in transitional economies and fiscal federalism. Understanding financial institutions in general, and monetary institutions in particular, was central to his teaching and research, with interests ranging from the proper regulation of banks and financial markets in poorer countries to the historical evolution of global and regional monetary systems in the context of the world dollar standard.

Mark Gregory Duggan is the Wayne and Jodi Cooperman Professor of Economics at Stanford University, where he is also the director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).

Timothy Francis Bresnahan is an American economist who researches industrial organization. He was a founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Economics, a fellow of the Econometric Society, and recipient of a BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in 2017.

Mordecai Kurz is an economist whose research work has covered a variety of problems in economic theory and policy. He has written extensively on growth theory, game theory, the formation of beliefs, and the effect of market power on inequality and growth, and he has worked on various policy projects. He contributed to the design of minimum income guarantee experiments in Seattle and Denver from 1971 to 1975, and in Manitoba in 1974. He also served as a special economic advisor to President Carter’s Commission on Pension Policy in 1979.

Neale Mahoney is a Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the inaugural George P. Shultz Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 2022-2023, Mahoney served in the Biden Administration's National Economic Council as a Special Policy Advisor for Economic Policy.

References

  1. Bruce M. Owen (January 2, 2003). "Statement on Media Ownership Rules" (PDF). Retrieved July 5, 2014.
  2. "Public Policy Program at Stanford University, Staff". Archived from the original on December 4, 2000. Retrieved May 12, 2014.
  3. FCC Internet Services Staff (October 29, 2001). "Biographies of Panelists at Roundtable on Media Ownership Policies". FCC. Retrieved September 5, 2013.
  4. "SIEPR Faculty and Staff – Biographies – Bruce Owen". July 11, 2010. Archived from the original on July 11, 2010. Retrieved May 18, 2016.
  5. Bruce M. Owen and Robert D. Willig (July 27, 2001). "Economics and Postal Pricing Policy" (PDF). Retrieved July 5, 2014.
  6. "Story: Economist Says Internet Use is Stagnant". TechLawJournal. July 9, 1999. Retrieved September 5, 2013.
  7. "Economists Incorporated". Archived from the original on August 23, 2003. Retrieved May 12, 2014.