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Jeffrey M. Perloff

  • Prof of Agricultural and Resource Economics, U of California at Berkeley, 1989-present; Assoc Prof, 1982-1989; Assistant Prof, 1980-1982
  • Asst Prof of Economics, U of Pennsylvania, 1976-1980
  • PhD, M.I.T., 1976 · BA, U of Chicago, 1972
  • AJAE Associate Editor 1987-1991
  • Industrial Relations Editor 9/1994 - 9/1996
  • Journal of Productivity Analysis Associate Editor 2003-present
  • Journal of Agricultural & Food Industrial Organization, Advisory Board 2003-present
  • AAEA representative to NBER Board of Directors 2003-present
  • Advisor to U. S. Departs of Commerce and Labor, study, 1978
  • Federal Trade Commission, expert witness, 1978, 1979
  • Consultant to the Bureau of Economics, 1980
  • Advisor to U. S. Department of Commerce, dumping investigation
  • Advisor to U. S. Labor Department, studies, 1978, 1979, 1980
  • Advisor to U. S. Postal Service, labor negotiations, various years
  • Advisor to National Commission for Manpower Policy, study, 1978
  • Advisor to U.S. Department of Agriculture, statistical advisor on the National Agricultural Workers Survey (with Aguirre International); cooperative agreements
  • California Employment Development Department, created computerized agricultural labor database, various studies, 1991, 1992, 1994
  • Advisor to U. S. Department of Justice, merger case
  • General Accounting Office, panel on market power and pricing in the cattle market
  • Advisor to California Attorney General, energy, 2002-present
  • Advisor to Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Academies: Future of Supercomputing committee, 2003-present

Jeffrey Perloff's research has concentrated on how institutions, laws, and government policies affect markets. His work covers many areas of agricultural economics, including industrial organization (theory, empirical, effects of agricultural policies, antitrust), marketing, labor (education, macro, micro, effects of government policies on labor and health, income distribution), trade, natural resources, law and economics, public finance, and econometrics. In addition, he has published in psychology and statistics.

He received a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His first academic position was in the Economics Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1981, he has been a faculty member in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California, Berkeley. He is currently the vice chair of that department. He has consulted widely with government agencies including the Federal Trade Commission; the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, and Justice; and various California agencies.

He is very committed to teaching. He is the author of two of the world's best selling economics textbooks: Microeconomics and Modern Industrial Organization (with Dennis W. Carlton). Modern Industrial Organization has been translated into French, Chinese, Italian, and other languages. He has coauthored many papers with his graduate students. He chairs Berkeley's campus-wide committee that oversees the Professional Development Program for minority and other students.

Probably his most widely cited research is his work on information and oligopoly behavior with Steve Salop (Review of Economics Studies 1985, Oxford Economics Papers 1986), which forms the theoretical underpinnings of random utility models of oligopoly with product diversity used in many recent empirical studies. His other well-known works on industrial organization and government policies include papers with Larry Karp on dynamic oligopoly (Review of Economics and Statistics 1989, AJAE 1993, International Journal of Industrial Organization 1993); with Amos Golan and Karp on estimating mixed strategy oligopoly models (an application to Coke and Pepsi in the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics 2000); and with Peter Berck on agricultural marketing orders (AJAE 1985).
He has many papers on trade including the effects of tariffs in markets with vertical restraints (Journal of International Economics with Fargeix) and with Larry Karp on strategic trade (e.g., International Economic Review 1993). His research on natural resources includes papers on fisheries with Peter Berck (Economerica 1984, AJAE 1985) and with Dennis Carlton on price discrimination in natural resources markets (Resources and Energy 1981).

In recent years he has written many papers developing maximum entropy techniques and applying them. Two of the most important theoretical papers are with Amos Golan and George Judge (Journal of the American Statistical Association 1996, Journal of Econometrics 1997). Applications include estimating agricultural workers' choice between hourly and piece rate employment (AJAE 1999), meat demand systems taking account of nonnegative constraints (Review of Economics and Statistics 2001 with Golan and Edward Z. Shen), and agricultural supply response functions (Journal of Economics 2001 with Shen).

He has also published widely on agricultural labor markets. His papers include studies the effects of job site sanitation on workers' health (AJAE 1988 with George Frisvold and Richard Mines), impact of wage differentials on choosing to work in agriculture (AJAE 1991), choice of housing tenure and wage compensation of hired agricultural workers (AJAE 1991), migration of seasonal workers (AJAE 1998 with Lori Lynch and Susan Gabbard), efficiency wages and deferred payment (AJAE 2002 with Enrico Moretti), and many other topics.