Kenneth G. Elzinga is the Robert C. Taylor Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia. He is an antitrust expert and co-authored a highly successful quartet of murder mystery novels in which the sleuth, dubbed Henry Spearman, solves the murder using principles of economics.
Elzinga's antitrust expertise led the U.S. Supreme Court to its 5–4 decision on June 28, 2007, in Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc. that minimum retail pricing schemes, formerly treated automatically as illegal under the Sherman Antitrust Act, may offer benefits to consumers.
His novels are written under the pseudonym Marshall Jevons, a mixture of economics pathfinders Alfred Marshall and William Stanley Jevons in collaboration with now-deceased Trinity University professor William L. Breit (1933-2011). The books are now assigned reading in many introductory college economics classes.
Elzinga's academic career began with his B.A. from Kalamazoo College (1963). He went on to earn both his masters (1966) and his Ph.D. from Michigan State (1967). His career has already spanned over 40 years, and he currently holds a distinguished chair at the University of Virginia. Himself the first winner of the UVA "Cavaliers’ Distinguished Teaching Professorship," Elzinga's scholarship has been recognized by the Southern Economic Association with an annual Distinguished Teaching award in his name. [1]
He has served as a Cambridge Fellow and currently serves on the editorial boards of The Journal of Markets and Morality and The Antitrust Bulletin. His scholarly work has appeared in the leading journals of economics, with the Florida State's Gus A. Stavros Center praising him as "probably the nation's most successful teacher of college-level economics." [2]
He served as a key plaintiff's witness in the government's 2004 antitrust case against Oracle Corporation over the acquisition of PeopleSoft, a case that the government lost. The court chose to reject Elzinga's economic analysis. [3]
His CV that was filed as an exhibit in the above case lists more than 50 publications on such topics as airline deregulation, cartels, predatory pricing, and even the beer industry. [4] He has won the UVA Alumni Association's Distinguished Professor Award, the Commonwealth of Virginia's Outstanding Faculty Award. And in 1992, he received the highest honor that UVA can bestow upon a faculty member, the Thomas Jefferson Award.
His co-authored mystery titles are Murder at the Margin (Thomas Norton & Daughters, 1978), The Fatal Equilibrium (The MIT Press, 1985), and A Deadly Indifference (Carrol & Graf, 1995). Also with Breit, he is co-author of The Antitrust Casebook: Milestones in Economic Regulation (Dryden Press, 1982).
Elzinga currently teaches at the University of Virginia. As of 2014 there is a campaign to raise $3 million to fund the Kenneth G. Elzinga Professorship in Economics and the Law at the University of Virginia's Department of Economics. [5]
Elzinga is active in several Christian ministries, and also makes a point each year of hosting several students at his Charlottesville-area home for Thanksgiving dinners.
In 2009, Elzinga was one of over 200 economists who signed an ad placed in newspapers by the libertarian Cato Institute opposing the Obama Administration's stimulus bill. [6]
Carl Menger von Wolfensgrün was an Austrian economist and the founder of the Austrian School of economics. Menger contributed to the development of the theories of marginalism and marginal utility, which rejected cost-of-production theory of value, such as developed by the classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. As a departure from such, he would go on to call his resultant perspective, the subjective theory of value.
Vernon Lomax Smith is an American economist and professor of business economics and law at Chapman University. He is formerly a professor of economics at the University of Arizona, professor of economics and law at George Mason University, and a board member of the Mercatus Center. Along with Daniel Kahneman, Smith shared the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to behavioral economics and his work in the field of experimental economics. He worked to establish 'laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms'.
William Stanley Jevons was an English economist and logician.
Edward Christian Prescott is an American economist. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2004, sharing the award with Finn E. Kydland, "for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles". This research was primarily conducted while both Kydland and Prescott were affiliated with the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon University. According to the IDEAS/RePEc rankings, he was the 19th most widely cited economist in the world in 2013. In August 2014, Prescott was appointed as an Adjunct Distinguished Economic Professor at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australia.
Gordon Tullock was an economist and professor of law and Economics at the George Mason University School of Law. He is best known for his work on public choice theory, the application of economic thinking to political issues. He was one of the founding figures in his field.
Marshall Jevons is a fictitious crime writer invented and used by William L. Breit and Kenneth G. Elzinga, professors of economics at Trinity University, San Antonio, and the University of Virginia, respectively.
Murder at the Margin (1978) is a whodunnit written by U.S. economists William Breit and Kenneth G. Elzinga using the joint pseudonym Marshall Jevons. The novel introduces Harvard economist Henry Spearman, a small, middle-aged, balding man who, when faced with murder, turns into an amateur sleuth who solves crimes by means of economic reasoning.
The Fatal Equilibrium is a mystery novel published under the pen name Marshall Jevons but actually written by William L. Breit and Kenneth G. Elzinga, both of whom are professors of economics. The book introduces many examples of economics theory and has been used as supplementary reading in many introductory courses in economics.
Jeffrey M. Lacker is an American economist and was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond until April 4, 2017. He is now a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Economics at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Business in Richmond, Virginia.
Robert D. Tollison was an American economist who specialized in public choice theory.
Mark Zupan is the President of Alfred University in Alfred, New York.
Neil De Marchi, is an Australian economist and historian of economic thought and is a professor at Duke University. De Marchi specializes in both teaching and research that pertains to the history of economic ideas and the history of markets, and also the functioning of markets with a specific focus on art markets. His works have appeared in such journals as the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, the Journal of Econometrics, the European Journal for the History of Economic Thought, and the Art Bulletin. He has also contributed to pieces within various books, having written introductions to such works as “Idealization in Economics, Poznan Studies 38,” and a biographical entry of John Stuart Mill for The Handbook of Economic Methodology. De Marchi received his Ph.D. from Australian National University in 1970, after completing his B.Phil. in economics at the University of Oxford. He also obtained his B.Ec. with first-class honors in 1960 from the University of Western Australia. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society.
Steven G. Horwitz was an American economist of the Austrian School. Horwitz was the Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise in the Department of Economics in the Miller College of Business at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. In 2017, he retired as the Dana Professor of Economics Emeritus at St. Lawrence University.
Goldfarb v. Virginia State Bar, 421 U.S. 773 (1975), was a U.S. Supreme Court decision. It stated that lawyers engage in "trade or commerce" and hence ended the legal profession's exemption from antitrust laws.
Joseph John Spengler was an American economist, statistician, and historian of economic thought. A recipient of the 1951 John Frederick Lewis Award of the American Philosophical Society and the 1981 Distinguished Fellow Award from the History of Economics Society, he was Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University at the time of his death.
Kenneth A. Schwartz, FAIA is an architect, community designer, planner, and educator based in New Orleans, LA. He is a Favrot Professor and former Dean of the Tulane School of Architecture.
William Breit (1933–2011) was an American economist, mystery novelist, and professional comedian. Breit was born in New Orleans. He received his undergraduate and master's degrees from the University of Texas and his Ph.D from Michigan State University in 1961. He was an Assistant and Associate Professor of Economics at Louisiana State University (1961–1965) On the recommendation of Milton Friedman he was interviewed and hired at the University of Virginia where he was Associate Professor and Professor of Economics (19651983). He returned to his San Antonio as the E.M. Stevens Distinguished Professor of Economics at Trinity University in 1983 and retired as the Vernon F. Taylor Distinguished Professor Emeritus in 2002. He is considered an expert in the history of economic thought and anti-trust economics. He established the Nobel Laureate Lecture Series at Trinity University and is most notable as a mystery novelist where their murder mysteries are solved by applying basic economic principles.
Robert Rogowsky is a professor of International Policy, Development and Trade at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
Connel Fullenkamp is an economist and the Director of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of the Practice in economics at Duke University, where he teaches core economics and financial economics courses. In addition to his work at Duke University, he consults for the IMF Institute for Capacity Development at the International Monetary Fund. As a member of the IMF's finance team, he trains government officials and central bankers in financial market regulation, with a focus on derivatives and emerging financial instruments. He has also collaborated with The Great Courses to produce several lecture series on economics and investing and consults for The New York Times as a faculty contributor to the NYT in Education courses in microeconomics and macroeconomics.
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.