HAROLD DEMSETZ
Arthur Andersen UCLA Alumni Emeritus Professor of Business Economics
Biographical Sketch as of April 1997
Born in Chicago, Illinois in 1930, Professor Demsetz received a BA degree from the University of Illinois in 1953, MBA (1954) and Ph.D. (1959) degrees from Northwestern University. His teaching career began at the University of Michigan in 1958 and continued at the University of California at Los Angeles until 1963. In 1963 he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, where he remained until 1971, returning in that year to the University of California. 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.
He is an elected 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 International. Northwestern University, in 1994, awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters, and, in 1996, he received an Honorary Doctorate in Social Science from Francisco Marroquin University. His name appears in Who
=s Who in America and similar directories.
Listed in Mark Blaugh's Great Economists Since Keynes, Professor Demsetz's research is focused on property rights, the business firm, and problems in monopoly, competition, and antitrust. The recipient of the Western Economics Association Distinguished Teaching Award in 1981, he is the author of numerous articles, three books, and three published monographs containing honorary lectures. The monographs contain his F. De Vries Honorary Lectures in Economic Theory given at Erasmus University in the Netherlands in 1981, his Uppsala Lectures in Business given at Uppsala University in Sweden in 1991, and his Crafoord Lecture on U.S. Antitrust Policy given at Lund University in Sweden in 1992. His most recent article, his Presidential Address to the Western Economics Association, titled
AThe Primacy of Economics: An Explanation of the Comparative Success of Economics in the Social Sciences,@ appeared in Economic Inquiry (January, 1997). His most recent book, The Economics of the Firm: Seven Critical Commentaries, was published by Cambridge University Press in 1995 and has been translated into Spanish and Chinese.