UChicago News

Wallace W. Booth, alumnus and trustee emeritus, 1922-2016

Tue, 19 Jul 2016 13:00 -0500

A prominent business executive and philanthropist, Trustee Emeritus Wallace (Wally) W. Booth, AB’48, MBA’48, died at home in Los Angeles last month at age 93.

Booth was the retired chairman of the board and CEO of Ducommun Inc., a Los Angeles-based company engaged in the production and servicing of aerospace-related components. Throughout his career, he held senior positions with Ford Motor Co., Rockwell International and United Brands, Inc.

Born in Nashville, Tenn., Booth was raised in Chicago. He served as an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II before earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business from UChicago in 1948. He was elected to the University Board of Trustees in 1982, becoming a life trustee in 1991 and trustee emeritus in 2007.

He served on the budget planning, development planning and investment committees and was a vice chair of the Council on the Graduate School of Business (Booth Council). In 1986 he endowed the Wallace W. Booth Professorship. (Wallace Booth is of no relation to David Booth, for whom Chicago Booth is named).

He served on the board of directors of several companies, including Litton Industries, Rohr, First Interstate Bank and Navistar International and was involved in a number of philanthropic organizations, including The Children’s Bureau, the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Foundation and the League for Children. Booth also was a former president of the Southern California United Way.

Booth is survived by his wife, Rosemary; his children, Ann Booth Cox and John England Booth; three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by Donna Booth, to whom he was married for 50 years.

Charles M. Harper, MBA'50, longtime supporter of Chicago Booth, 1927-2016

Thu, 02 Jun 2016 10:00 -0500

Charles M. Harper, a University of Chicago Booth School of Business alumnus whose landmark gift in 2007 led to the renaming of the school’s main campus building in Hyde Park, died May 28 at his home in Omaha. He was 88.

Harper, who was known as Mike, earned his MBA in 1950. He rose to prominence in the 1970s when he rescued ConAgra from near bankruptcy and transformed the failing food producer into an industry powerhouse. After a 1985 heart attack forced him to change his eating habits, Harper pioneered the creation of ConAgra’s Healthy Choice brand—one of the first mainstream food lines aimed at healthful diets.

“Throughout his remarkable career, Mike was an extraordinary alumnus. Even in retirement, he remained a generous and engaged supporter of Chicago Booth,” said Sunil Kumar, Chicago Booth dean and the George Pratt Shultz Professor of Operations Management.

In recognition of his donation in 2007, at the time the largest gift in the business school’s history, the Hyde Park Center at 5807 S. Woodlawn Ave. was renamed the Charles M. Harper Center. He also sponsored the Charles M. Harper Road to CEO Series and served on the Council on Chicago Booth from 1992 to 1995. He was awarded Booth’s Distinguished Corporate Alumnus Award in 1991.

Harper was born on Sept. 27, 1927 in Lansing, Mich., and grew up in South Bend, Ind. He received a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from Purdue University and served in the U.S. Army. After earning his MBA, Harper began his career as an engineer for General Motors, followed by 20 years at Pillsbury, a unit of General Mills, where he was a group vice president.

During his nearly two decades at ConAgra—as executive vice president and chief operating officer in 1974 until his retirement as chairman and chief executive officer in 1992—ConAgra’s annual sales increased from $600 million to more than $20 billion. After a brief retirement, he served as chairman and chief executive of RJR Nabisco from 1993 to 1996.

Harper’s wife, Josie, preceded him in death. The Josie Harper Admissions Suite at Booth is named for her. Harper is survived by his daughters, Carolyn Harper, Elizabeth Murphy and Kathleen Wenngatz; son, Charles Jr.; 11 grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.

Willard Manning, a leading researcher in health economics, 1946-2014

Fri, 12 Dec 2014 15:04 -0600

Willard G. Manning Jr., a leading researcher in health economics, died at British Home Rehabilitation in Brookfield, Ill. on Nov. 25. He was 68.

Manning taught at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and in the Department of Public Health Sciences before his retirement in 2011.

“Will was a beloved professor and an extraordinary researcher,” said Daniel Diermeier, dean of Chicago Harris. “In his distinguished career, he made many important contributions to our understanding of health insurance, poor health habits and mental health. We will miss a dear colleague and dedicated teacher.”

“What made Will stand out was not only the importance and rigor of his research but also the seriousness with which he approached his responsibilities as a member of the University and the larger academic community,” said Diane Lauderdale, professor of epidemiology and chair of Public Health Sciences. “The time and thought he put into mentoring junior faculty, advising graduate students and reviewing the work of others were extraordinary.”

With a focus on health economics, Manning is known for his studies that tested how the structure of insurance and costs affected demand for medical care and health. He developed a robust model to estimate optimal health insurance coverage by considering the tradeoff between the costs from moral hazard and the gains from risk pooling in health insurance.

In addition, his work involved rigorous examinations of statistical issues in modeling health and economic data, and the investigation of economic consequences of poor health habits, smoking, heavy drinking and lack of exercise. He was widely known for his work on the RAND Health Insurance Experiment, a randomized trial of alternative insurance plans conducted from 1974-1982.

Dan Black, deputy dean and professor at Chicago Harris, said Manning’s work with the RAND study “transformed our understanding of health insurance and has been the gold standard against which research in health economics and health services are still measured today.”

Black also commended Manning’s deep commitment to the teaching of statistics and the craft of research. “Will cared deeply that his research arrived at the correct conclusions, and he instilled this concern in his students,” said Black.

Manning published over 150 articles and chapters in his career and co-authored five books, including The Costs of Poor Health Habits by Harvard University Press in 1991. He received numerous awards for his papers on health economics, including the Victor Fuchs Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Health Economists in 2010, the Distinguished Investigator Award at the annual meeting of Academy Health in 2009 and the Kenneth Arrow Prize for the Best Health Economics Article in 2003.

A member of the Institute of Medicine, Manning served on different committees addressing the lack of insurance and health care at the end of life. He was also on a National Academy of Science panel that examined adding measures of medical risk to new poverty measures.

“Will’s scholarship made timeless contributions to our knowledge about how to analyze data on health spending and has allowed us to better understand critical health policy issues,” said David O. Meltzer, professor in the Department of Medicine, and affiliated faculty of Chicago Harris and the Department of Economics. “The methods he developed are essential tools for all health economists today.”

Meltzer, who was Manning’s research and teaching colleague for many years, said Manning’s devotion to his students was legendary.

“Will would provide amazingly detailed and thoughtful comments draft after draft of their written work and spend endless hours helping students solve their most difficult problems,” Meltzer added. “He set a standard for mentorship that is truly inspiring and is a model for all of us who have the honor of helping to train the next generation of scholars and teachers.”

For years, Manning had been plagued with health problems, but his daughters Lisa Manning and Heather Carlson describe their father as “an incredibly resilient man who overcame the obstacles with determination and positivity until the very end.”

As a father, Lisa said Manning taught his children and grandchildren to embrace the joy of learning and encouraged many endeavors that they had pursued in life. “My father was incredibly generous, which I always found very inspiring,” remembered Lisa. “He lit up at the prospect of seeing his grandchildren in a school recital or soccer game. The times I saw him playing Legos with them were the times he seemed to be at his happiest.”

Manning is survived by his wife, Erika Manning; his daughters, Lisa Manning and Heather Carlson; his son-in-law, Brad Carlson; and his grandchildren, Emelia and Andrew Carlson.

University Trustee Emeritus Steven G. Rothmeier, 1946-2014

Wed, 11 Jun 2014 11:05 -0500

Steven G. Rothmeier, MBA’72, was a risk-taker as a businessman, a decorated Vietnam-era veteran and a Trustee Emeritus at the University of Chicago. Rothmeier died on May 14 at age 67 in a Florida nursing home after a long illness.

Rothmeier was elected to the University’s Board of Trustees in 1987. He served on the audit, development, financial planning, investment, and trusteeship committees, and in 2007 he was made a Trustee Emeritus. He served as board chair of the ARCH Development Corporation, a UChicago entity that provides seed money for venture capital projects. He also was a life member of the Booth Council and a member of the Harper Society Founder’s Circle.

“Steve and I met the very first day of school at orientation for the graduate students in 1971,” recalled John Edwardson, MBA’72, a University of Chicago Trustee and the retired chairman and CEO of CDW. “He was freshly back from Vietnam, and we just hit it off and became good friends and stayed good friends. He was a vigorous, tough, but fun-loving guy. We enjoyed our time together at Booth.”

In the business world, Rothmeier was known as a no-nonsense executive who remade Northwest Airlines in the 1980s. He joined Northwest Airlines in 1973 as a corporate financial analyst and five years later, Rothmeier was promoted to vice president for finance, treasurer and CFO. At age 32, he was the youngest CFO in the history of the company and the youngest in the U.S. airline industry. A few years later, Rothmeier was named Northwest Airlines’ president and chief operating officer.

Rothmeier engineered the $884 million acquisition of Republic Airlines by Northwest in 1986—at that time, the largest-ever airline deal. In 1989, he successfully negotiated the sale of NWA, Inc., the parent company of Northwest Airlines, for $3.6 billion. He described himself as developing a reputation as a “risk-taker” during this merger, as he steered the company through difficult times in the late 1980s.

Edwardson worked with Rothmeier at NWA as CFO for a few years before moving on to become president of United Airlines and chairman and chief executive of CDW.

“I’d describe his management style as tough, but fair,” Edwardson said of Rothmeier. “He was very demanding, but the airline industry is a very demanding one that requires leaders to be tough and forceful in their jobs. He was never mean-spirited or vindictive. What most people didn’t know was that he had an absolutely wicked sense of humor.”

Following his time at NWA, Inc., Rothmeier became president of IAI Capital Group. In 1993, he founded and served as chairman and CEO of Great Northern Capital, his own merchant banking, consulting and investment-management company. He retired in 2012.

He also served as a director on the boards of more than a dozen New York Stock Exchange-traded corporations. In 2011, The Wall Street Journal named him one of America’s eight most effective corporate directors. Rothmeier also co-founded and directed the Lumen Christi Institute in Chicago. He was the past director of the American Council on Germany, a former trustee for the German Marshall Fund of the United States and former vice-chairman of the U.S.–China Business Council.

Rothmeier was born in Mankato, Minn., and raised in Faribault, Minn. In 1968, he received his BA in Business Administration from the University of Notre Dame, where he also played varsity football. After graduation, Rothmeier served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Army Commendation Medal and Bronze Star Medal. He then came to UChicago to earn his master’s degree.

He is survived by his mother, Alice; two brothers, Michael and Jay; three nephews and two nieces. A requiem mass was held in St. Paul on May 28.

Gary S. Becker, Nobel-winning scholar of economics and sociology, 1930-2014

Sun, 04 May 2014 11:35 -0500

Nobel Laureate Gary S. Becker, AM'53, PhD'55, made historic changes to the study of economics and the social sciences, combining disciplines to understand decisions in everyday life, while spawning rich new questions for scholars in diverse fields to pursue.

Becker, 83, University Professor of Economics and of Sociology at the University of Chicago, died on May 3 following complications from a recent surgery. He won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1992 “for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction, including non-market behavior.”

Becker pioneered study in the fields of human capital, economics of the family, and economic analysis of crime, discrimination, addiction, and population. University of Chicago President Robert J. Zimmer said Becker will be remembered as one of the foremost economics scholars of the 20th century.

"Gary was a transformational thinker of truly remarkable impact on the world and an extraordinary individual,” Zimmer said. “He was intellectually fearless. As a scholar and as a person, he represented the best of what the University of Chicago aspires to be."

In 2011, the University recognized Becker’s contributions by naming a research institute in honor of him and his mentor, Milton Friedman, also a Nobel Prize-winning economist at UChicago. The Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics brings together many of the world’s outstanding economists to advance and disseminate innovative research. Becker was named chair of the institute.

“Gary Becker was an exceptional intellectual leader,” said Lars Peter Hansen, the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, Statistics, and the College, research director of the Becker Friedman Institute and a fellow Nobel laureate in economics. “His pathbreaking research was remarkable in terms of its breadth, importance and creativity. For years he has been the personification of Chicago economics with his penetrating insights and analyses focusing on important economic and social challenges. His dedication to the University of Chicago and to Chicago economics was truly unique.”

His friend, colleague, and fellow Nobel Laureate James J. Heckman remembered Becker as a brilliant and tough-minded thinker.

“He was a creative mind, and he ranged in his thinking across a large set of issues—the economics of education and skill formation, economics of discrimination, law and economics, the economics of social interactions, and economics of the family,” Heckman said.

“He kept a finger on the pulse of American public policy [and] analyzed ‘relevant’ problems in a much deeper way than is usually associated with public policy,” Heckman said. “It was not a ‘quick answer’ kind of analysis. He laid the framework for discussing social problems.”

Fellow Nobel-winning economist Robert E. Lucas Jr., the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and the College, noted Becker's influence on his own research. “Gary was a good friend and colleague and a very great economist. I find myself building in some way on his work in almost everything I do."

Longtime Becker collaborator Kevin Murphy recalled his senior colleague’s love of economics and the University.

“He was devoted to and helped define Chicago Economics, a rich tradition that uses economics to understand and shape the world around us," said Murphy, the George J. Stigler Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the Chicago Booth School of Business. “Gary was an inspiration to several generations of Chicago students—instilling in them the love for economics that he lived and breathed.”

"Gary was an outstanding scholar and a beloved professor. The Booth community has suffered a great loss," said Chicago Booth Dean Sunil Kumar, the George Pratt Shultz Professor of Operations Management.

Breaking new ground in economics

Becker broke new ground by approaching economics as the study of human behavior. He crossed disciplinary boundaries to apply core economic tenets—maximizing behavior, market equilibrium, stable preferences, and rational choice—to subjects thought to be the domain of sociology, psychology, law, and other fields.

Much of his work illuminates diverse aspects of human behavior that were previously considered to be largely irrational.  

The Economics of Discrimination (1957) applied economic analysis to the study of prejudice against minorities. His 1964 book, Human Capital, examined how investments in a person’s education and training pay off. In his 1981 book, A Treatise on the Family, he expanded that work to a study of the interactions within a family, including those between parents and children, husbands and wives, and among siblings. Becker concluded that women’s entry into the work force and their increased earning power have reduced demand for children, because women’s time has become more valuable.

Becker became one of the most-cited economists, yet his early career was fraught with controversy. Early on, economists questioned the value of his analysis of social problems. “For a long time, my type of work was either ignored or strongly disliked by most of the leading economists,” Becker wrote in his autobiography. “I was considered way out and perhaps not really an economist.”

Those early challenges only strengthened Becker’s work, according to Heckman.

“He persevered in a scholarly way,” said Heckman, the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor in Economics. “He didn’t just listen to the critics—he responded to the critics. It always enriched him.”

From Chicago to New York and back

Born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, Becker completed his undergraduate work summa cum laude in mathematics at Princeton University, where he “accidentally took a course in economics” as a freshman and was “greatly attracted by the mathematical rigor of a subject that dealt with social organization.” He earned a master's degree and a PhD from the University of Chicago, where Milton Friedman became his enthusiastic mentor.

“Friedman considered him the best student he ever had,” Heckman said. In later years Friedman would call Becker “the greatest social scientist who has lived and worked in the last half century.”

After serving as an assistant professor in economics at UChicago from 1954 to 1957, Becker joined the faculty at Columbia University, where he conducted research at the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York.

At Columbia he started a workshop on labor economics and related subjects. He was joined after a few years by Columbia economist Jacob Mincer. “We had a very exciting atmosphere and attracted most of the best students at Columbia. Both Mincer and I were doing research on human capital before the subject was adequately appreciated in the profession at large, and the students found it fascinating. We were also working on the allocation of time and other subjects at the forefront of research,” Becker wrote in his autobiography.

Upon returning to Chicago in 1970, Becker resumed his contact with leading economists on the faculty. In particular, he collaborated with George Stigler, also a Nobel Prize winning economist, with whom he wrote influential papers on the stability of tastes and an early treatment of the principal-agent problem, while pursuing his interest in the family.

Economics pervaded every aspect of Becker’s life—even his marriage to University of Illinois at Chicago historian Guity Nashat Becker. The two met haggling over the price of a dining room set Becker had advertised. Becker refused to lower the price, but said he would allow her to take the furniture and pay for it later.

“I asked how come he wouldn’t come down on the price, but he trusted me with the table before paying for it,” she later recalled. He said: ‘I didn’t care about getting the money. But it was the principle, I did not want to sell it below what it was worth.’ What surprised me even more was when he asked me to dinner.”

The two married in 1980.

Interdisciplinary interests

Reflecting his multidisciplinary interests, Becker was appointed professor in sociology in 1984 and held appointments at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the Law School in addition to serving on the economics faculty.

He worked with noted sociologist James Coleman, and the two taught an interdisciplinary faculty seminar on rational choice in the social sciences. He also taught a workshop for many years with Richard Posner, a federal appeals court judge and member of the University’s Law School faculty. The two started the popular Becker-Posner blog in 2002. Becker was to remain active as a scholar and as a public intellectual until shortly before he died. His last two blog posts this year presented arguments in favor of legalizing marijuana and ending the U.S. embargo of Cuba. The blog led to a book based on their exchanges, Uncommon Sense: Economic Insights, from Marriage to Terrorism.

Becker was a founding member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow in the American Statistical Association, the Econometric Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population.

He also was a member of the American Economic Association, serving as its president in 1987.

In 1967, Becker was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, then given once every two years to the most outstanding American economist under the age of 40. He also won the Seidman Award and the first social science Award of Merit from the National Institute of Health. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2000 for his work in social policy and the Presidential Medal of Honor in 2007. He received the University’s Alumni Medal, the highest award the Alumni Association bestows, in 2010.

Gary Becker is survived by his wife Guity; two daughters, Catherine Becker and Judy Becker; a sister, Natalie Becker; two stepsons, Cyrus Claffey and Michael Claffey; two step-grandchildren; and two grandchildren.

The University of Chicago will plan a memorial service to honor Becker’s life and work, with details to be announced at a later date.

Ronald H. Coase, founding scholar in law and economics, 1910-2013

Mon, 02 Sep 2013 21:30 -0500

Ronald H. Coase helped create the field of law and economics, through groundbreaking scholarship that earned him the 1991 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and through his far-reaching influence as a journal editor.

Coase, who spent most of his academic career at the University of Chicago Law School, died at the age of 102 on Sept. 2 at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Chicago. He was the oldest living Nobel laureate, according to the Nobel Foundation.

Coase, the Clifton R. Musser Professor Emeritus of Economics, is best known for his 1937 paper, “The Nature of the Firm,” which offered groundbreaking insights about why firms exist and established the field of transaction cost economics, and “The Problem of Social Cost,” published in 1960, which is widely considered to be the seminal work in the field of law and economics. The latter set out what is now known as the Coase Theorem, which holds that under conditions of perfect competition, private and social costs are equal.

“That Ronald Coase is among the most influential and best-cited economists in the past 50 years is not debatable,” said Law School Professor Emeritus William M. Landes and Sonia Lahr-Pastor, JD'13, a researcher at the Law School, in “Measuring Coase’s Influence.” They presented the paper at a 2009 conference titled “Markets, Firms and Property Rights: A Celebration of the Research of Ronald Coase.”

“Among the highest aspirations of the University of Chicago is to create new fields of study that change our world for the better,” said President Robert J. Zimmer. “Ronald Coase embodied that ideal. His groundbreaking scholarship made impacts on law and policy that people around the globe continue to feel today. As a scholar, a colleague and a mentor, his historic contributions enriched our intellectual community and the world at large.”

“Ronald Coase achieved what most academics can only dream of – immortality,” said Michael H. Schill, dean of the University of Chicago Law School. “His scholarship fundamentally changed the way lawyers approach issues of when and how government should intervene in the economy, and when and how private contracts should govern. His work could not be more relevant to many of the debates we are enmeshed in today.

“Our great law school has contributed much to the world of law and jurisprudence,” Schill said. “Ronald’s contributions were among the most important.”

His intellectual impact continued late into his life, when at the age of 101, he published his final book, How China Became Capitalist, co-authored with former student Ning Wang, PhD’02.

Coase’s enduring legacy at the University of Chicago is reflected in the Law School’s Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics, named in honor of Coase and donors Richard and Ellen Sandor, who gave UChicago $10 million in support of law and economics scholarship.

"Ronald Coase inspired a new way of thinking about law and about the application of economics," said Omri Ben-Shahar, the Leo and Eileen Herzel Professor of Law and Kearney Director of the Coase-Sandor Institute. "His insights are simple but at the same time profound. They are accessible to first-year students, and their implications continue to provoke cutting-edge research. We will continue to develop the field that he inspired, and to build on the vitality of his ideas."

“Professor Coase’s research on property rights provided the academic underpinning for the establishment of the Acid Rain Program in the United States in the early 1990s, which virtually eliminated acid rain pollution in America,” said Richard Sandor, chairman and chief executive officer of Environmental Financial Products, LLC. “Personally, he has been a source of inspiration and mentoring to me for over 40 years. Professor Coase provided me with unwavering intellectual support to carry on my ideas as both an academic and a practitioner.

“The Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics at the University of Chicago will continue to support and expand Coase's legacy in areas such as the environment, health care and education,” Sandor said.

A ‘lucky chance’ leads to economics

Coase graduated from the London School of Economics with a B.Com. in economics in 1932 after spending his final year of studies in the United States on a Sir Ernest Cassel Traveling Scholarship. During that year abroad, he focused on the structure of American automotive industry and why some work was performed inside firms and some by the marketplace. These ideas became the basis of “The Nature of the Firm.”

Sir Arnold Plant, a British economist at the London School of Economics, was a major influence on Coase while he was a student there. Until meeting him in his senior year, Coase had never taken an economics course, only accounting and business. Plant introduced Coase to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” and to the idea that competitive economic systems could be coordinated by the pricing system. In an autobiographical essay written for the Nobel organization, Coase writes that Plant “changed my life,” influencing his ideas, helping his achieve the Cassel Traveling Scholarship and setting him on the path to becoming an economist.

“My life has been a lucky chance at all points,” Coase said in a 2012 interview with the UChicago News Office.

Coase believed the incentives of private parties to resolve disputes in their own best interests, even if there needs to be adjudication by courts, should result in an efficient, mutually beneficial solution that is always preferable to government intervention. This theory, known as the Coase Theorem, has been applied to such issues as the sale of rights to broadcast on portions of the electromagnetic spectrum and the problem of pollution; while countless other economists have applied it to virtually every area of human activity.

“Ronald Coase discovered many of the foundational ideas of modern economics,” said Douglas Baird, the Harry A. Bigelow Distinguished Service Professor of Law, in a 2006 lecture on “Coase’s Journey.”

“When I teach Property, the first thing I cover on Day 1 is the ‘Coase Theorem,’ and the last thing we talk about on the final day is the same thing,” Schill said. “Ronald’s insights infused all of my scholarship and the scholarship of many, many professors throughout the world in countless fields.”

Coase reminisced about “The Nature of the Firm” in a 2009 video address recorded as part of a Law School celebration of his 100th birthday and the 50th anniversary of the publication of “The Problem of Social Cost.” In his unhurried, thoughtful cadence, Coase said he was surprised by how much it is cited since it was “little more than an undergraduate essay.”

He disputed his onetime characterization of firms as having diminishing rates of return as they grow larger, calling the growth a sociological issue, not an economic problem.

“I learned a great deal about how large organizations operate during my World War work when I was in the Cabinet office,” he said of his changed opinion. During World War II, Coase served as a statistician with the Central Statistical Office of the Offices of the British War Cabinet.

‘What an exhilarating event!’

In his personal essay for Nobel, Coase described being invited to UChicago to defend a 1959 paper he had written on the Federal Communications Commission to a group of skeptical UChicago economists. In that evening gathering at Law School Professor Aaron Director’s home, he was able to persuade them to his view that as long as legal rights are properly defined, efficient solutions will prevail. He was asked to write an article for The Journal of Law and Economics, which Director had recently founded. The outcome was “The Problem of Social Cost.”

“Had it not been for the fact that these economists at the University of Chicago thought that I had made an error in my article on The Federal Communications Commission, it is probable that ‘The Problem of Social Cost’ would never have been written,” Coase said

George Stigler, PhD’38, an economist at UChicago and 1982 Nobel Prize winner, later wrote in his 1988 book, Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist, about that night: “We strongly objected to this heresy. Milton Friedman [UChicago economist and 1976 Nobel laureate] did most of the talking, as usual. He also did much of the thinking, as usual. In the course of two hours of argument, the vote went from 21 against and one for Coase to 21 for Coase.

“What an exhilarating event! I lamented afterward that we had not had the clairvoyance to tape it.”

Coase was hired at the UChicago Law School in 1964.

“It was the first law school, to my knowledge, that had an economist teaching full time,” said University Professor Gary Becker, the 1992 Nobel laureate in economics, at a luncheon in honor of Coase’s 100th birthday, according to The University of Chicago Magazine. Coase took over The Journal of Law and Economics after Director retired in 1965 until 1982, and according to Becker he “really made it into a major and influential journal.”

Creating a field of study

“I used the journal to change views,” Coase told the UChicago News Office in 2012. “I wanted to use the journal to create a subject, and I did.”

Becker said that when he first met Coase in 1970, Coase “didn’t say a lot, but I began to realize that every time he did say something, it was really profound.”

Coase was born in a suburb of London in December 1910, the only child of a Post Office telegraphist and his wife. While his parents were more interested in sports than scholarship, both having left school as the age of 12, Coase was always drawn to academic endeavors. However, in his youth due to leg braces he had to wear, he was sent to a school for “physical defectives” and because of the school’s curriculum, started his academic education later than other children.

After graduating from the London School of Economics, he held positions at the Dundee School of Economics and the University of Liverpool before joining the faculty of the LSE in 1935. He continued at the London School of Economics and was appointed Reader in Economics with special reference to public utilities in 1947.

Coase held both a Sir Ernest Cassel Traveling Scholarship and a Rockefeller Fellowship. He was also a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, in Stanford, California.

In 1951 Coase migrated to the United States and held positions at the Universities of Buffalo and Virginia prior to coming to the Law School in 1964. He taught regulated industries and economic analysis and public policy. Coase was the editor of the Journal of Law and Economics from 1964 to 1982. Among his many books are The Firm, the Market and the Law (1988) and Essays on Economics and Economists (1994).

In 1977 Coase was a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Coase was a Fellow of the British Academy, the European Academy, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a member of the Honour Committee of Euroscience. He held honorary doctorate degrees from the University of Cologne, Yale University, Washington University, the University of Dundee, the University of Buckingham, Beloit College and the University of Paris. In 2003, Coase was the winner of The Economist’s Innovation Award in the category of “No Boundaries.”

An endlessly active mind

Coase’s more recent work continued to look into the complicated nature of the firm, as well as the emergence of capitalism outside government control. In his 2012 book How China Became Capitalist, Coase and his co-author, Wang, traced the market transformation China experienced over the past 35 years. The book argued that the changes came not from deliberate actions taken by Chinese leadership, as often claimed by Beijing, but from “marginal revolutions.”

“China became capitalist while it was trying to modernize socialism,” Coase and Wang wrote. “The story of China is the quintessence of what Adam Ferguson called ‘the products of human action but not human design.’ A Chinese proverb puts it more poetically: ‘The flowers planted on purpose do not blossom; the willows no one cared for have grown into big shade trees.’”

Even before his last book Coase enjoyed a towering reputation in China, Richard Sandor said.

“With the exception of Milton Friedman, no other Western economist is as revered and respected among Chinese scholars and policymakers,” Sandor said. “Coase always believed that ultimately China's respect for new ideas and education will provide a fertile ground for law and economics scholarship in that country.”

Coase said in 2012 that his main scholarly talent was to identify solutions that were in plain sight.

“I’ve never done anything that wasn’t obvious, and I didn’t know why other people didn’t do it,” he said. “I’ve never thought the things I did were so extraordinary.”

Coase was preceded in death by his wife, Marion Ruth. The Law School will host a memorial to Coase later this fall, at a date and time to be announced.

Robert Fogel, won Nobel Prize in Economics, 1926-2013

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 18:15 -0500

Update: A celebration of the life and work of Prof. Robert Fogel will be held Oct. 4 from 4 to 5:30 p.m. at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. A reception will follow at the Charles M. Harper Center.

Robert W. Fogel, an economic historian at the University of Chicago who won the Nobel Prize in 1993 for his studies of slavery in the United States and the role railroads played in the development of the economy, died Tuesday, June 11. His death at age 86 followed a brief illness, according to his family.

Fogel used quantitative methods to explain economic and institutional change. His work often challenged conventional wisdom and was, at the time, controversial. His research showed that the economic impact of railroads in the 19th century was far less than generally assumed.

“Professor Fogel has changed the way that people think about several really important topics through his work. When you find such a new way of thinking about things, that’s going to discomfort some people,” said Hoyt Bleakley, associate professor of economics at Chicago Booth, who taught a course with Fogel this year.

Fogel was an active faculty member in Economics and the Booth School of Business, where he continued to do research and taught three courses covering the economics and demographics of marketing, population and the economy, and business ethics. Fogel was the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions, director of the University of Chicago Center for Population Economics and a faculty member of the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought.

“He gave his students, staff and collaborators an incredible amount of freedom,” said Joseph Burton, executive director of the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics at the University of Chicago. “I was always struck by how supportive he was of original thinking, and by how much freedom we had to carry out his research agenda, as well as build our own projects and interests.”

Burton, who is a former research director at the Center for Population Economics, said Fogel always made sure to credit others for their work, and was a mentor to many economists and economic historians.

“It’s been a real pleasure to be in the classroom with him because he had such a unique perspective that was informed in part by his lifetime of work as well as by his personal experiences,” Bleakley said. “He was always thinking about the world from the perspective of an economist and from the perspective of a data cruncher. He was very interested in how the world works and in how our lives have changed and will continue to change.”

Nathaniel Grotte, associate director of the Center for Population Economics, said, “What will really stick with me is his incredible generosity with his time and expertise, and how unfailingly kind he always was to everyone. He thrived on discussion and debate, and nothing made him happier than being challenged.”

Fogel first attracted attention as a PhD student at the Johns Hopkins University in 1962 with his statistical analysis of the impact of railroads on 19th-century American economic development. In his book Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History, he showed that the U.S. economy in the 1800s would have grown at the same rate, even if railroads didn’t exist.

His book, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, written with Stanley Engerman, sparked debate from the moment it was published in 1974. In it, Fogel and Engerman challenged the long-held assumption, by then taken as fact, that slavery was unprofitable, inefficient and in decline in the years leading up to the Civil War. Their research found that slave farms were as productive as free farms and that the viability of slavery — as well as the economy of the antebellum South — was increasing. His four-volume Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery continued to generate controversy.

Fogel and Engerman met when both were at Johns Hopkins. “We shared an office in the attic with about four other people,” Engerman said, adding that while in school the pair already had started thinking about the research that would become Time on the Cross, but they had to wait until Fogel had finished Railroads and American Economic Growth.

“He was quite willing to approach problems in a way that other people didn’t,” Engerman said. “He looked at them in a different way than most other people did. By asking slightly different questions he was able to learn quite a lot and teach people a lot. He also was probably as hard a working person as anyone would meet.”

In the 1980s, Fogel began to focus on what he called “the problem of creating and studying larger life-cycle and intergenerational data sets.” This research led him to write many research papers and several books on the economics of aging, including The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, and The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition and Human Development in the Western World since 1700. The Changing Body was written with Roderick Floud, Bernard Harris and Sok Chul Hong.

During his career, Fogel wrote 22 books—the most recent, released in April, Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics. He also was working on three others at the time of his death. Fogel also published 90 papers in academic journals. Much of his research since 1991 was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and its National Institute on Aging Program. The National Science Foundation also funded his research.

Among Fogel’s recent projects was an examination of veterans of the Union Army, Bleakley said, “which again has been a long, hard slog through data with the intent of seeing how human health and potential have changed dramatically over time, and of understanding trends and reasons for those trends.”

“I had the privilege of teaching with Bob Fogel this past year, and I saw some of that approach in the class we taught. He would take something that the students and I had a much shorter-term perspective on, and he would just stretch that way out and say, ‘Look, this phenomenon that you may think of here, it also appeared 50 years ago, 100 years ago with this twist.’”

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Fogel the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics “for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change,” according to the Nobel citation. The Academy called his study of railroads and American economic growth a “scientific breakthrough.” Fogel shared the Nobel Prize with Douglass North, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

The Alliance for Aging Research recognized Fogel as the “Indispensable Person in Health Research” for 2006, for his work on the economics of health and health care.

Fogel was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was chosen as one of the “1,000 Makers of the 20th Century” by the London Times.

Fogel was president of the American Economic Association in 1998.

During his academic career, he spoke at more than 230 faculty seminars and workshops at colleges and universities around the world.

Fogel was born in New York City on July 1, 1926 — four years after his parents emigrated from Odessa, Russia. “Although they arrived in New York penniless, my parents scraped together enough savings to establish the first of several small businesses just after I was born,” he wrote in an autobiography posted on the Nobel Prize website.

“My education in the public schools of New York City between 1932 and 1944 was an excellent preparation for a life in science,” he wrote. “Because of the Depression, these schools were able to attract a remarkably talented and dedicated collection of teachers who encouraged their students to strive for the highest levels of accomplishment. That environment led me to aspire to a career in science, and also kindled my love for literature and history.”

“Many people think of intellectuals as being above such things as pride in one’s country and patriotism,” Burton said. “He had a deep appreciation for this country and its institutions, and often acknowledged the ways his career had been made possible because his parents had immigrated to the U.S. before he was born.”

Fogel was married to his wife, Enid, for 59 years until her death in 2007. “No individual has done more to help me pursue a career in science” than his wife, he wrote in his autobiography. “Over the years, Enid has been both my most confident supporter and keenest critic. She helped boost my self-confidence when my unorthodox findings provoked controversy and criticism, and she often provided insightful suggestions for the improvement of my lectures, papers, books, letters and research proposals.

“Throughout the years she has been the overseer of my social conscience, pulling me back to reality when she saw that my preoccupation with the abstract aspects of scientific issues had led me to extenuate their deeply human aspects.”

Fogel joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1964, moved to Harvard in 1975, and returned in 1981 to the Chicago faculty, where he stayed for the rest of his career. He taught at the University of Rochester from 1960 to 1964.

Fogel received a PhD from the Johns Hopkins University, a master’s degree from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University. He received nine honorary degrees, including those from Cambridge, Harvard, the University of Rochester, the University of Palermo in Italy and the University of London.

While studying for his bachelor’s degree at Cornell, Fogel sought out professors with varied areas of expertise, a move that broadened his perspectives during his five decades of academic research.

Sons Michael and Steven, who both live in Chicago, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, survive Fogel.

Fogel’s burial will be private. A memorial service for the University community will be planned on campus over the summer. In lieu of flowers, the family encourages donations to Equip for Equality, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the rights of the disabled. Letters of condolence may be sent care of: Center for Population Economics, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, 5807 S. Woodlawn Ave., Chicago, IL 60637.

Eric Kerestes, Chicago Booth student, 1981-2012

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 10:02 -0500

Eric Kerestes, a 30-year-old student in the Evening MBA Program at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, died after being struck by a taxicab early Tuesday, Aug. 14, as he waited for a bus on the Near West Side of Chicago.

Tatijana Stafets Kerestes, MBA’12, Kerestes’ wife, said the pair had been "inseparable."

“We’ve been together since our freshman year of college, 12 years ago,” she said, adding that they were married two years ago in Portugal.

Kerestes, who started at Chicago Booth in the fall of 2010, was on track to graduate next spring.

“From the day that I met Eric, he's always been warm and welcoming. This quarter, I sought him out as a group member knowing that I would enjoy working with him,” said Don Woods, MBA’12. “Having just completed a project with him on Monday, I am stunned and deeply saddened by the news. My heart goes out to Tatijana and their families.”

While working on his MBA, Kerestes served as a district business solutions manager with Chicago-based infrastructure firm Peter Kiewit and Sons, where he would assist in IT support.

A native of Bloomington, Ill., Kerestes received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Visitation will be held from 4 to 7 p.m. Friday, Aug. 17, at Carmody-Flynn Funeral Home, 1800 Eastland Drive, Bloomington, Ill. A funeral Mass will begin at 10 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 18, at Holy Trinity Catholic Church, 704 N. Main St., Bloomington.

Those who wish may write a note to Kerestes’ wife and family. Blank cards will be available at the front desk of the Evening and Weekend Program Office in Gleacher Center Suite 330 through Saturday, Aug. 25. Cards also may be mailed to: E/W Program Office, Attn: Kerestes Family, 450 N. Cityfront Plaza Drive, Suite 330, Chicago, IL 60611.

Larry Sjaastad, scholar of international economics, 1934-2012

Wed, 09 May 2012 14:12 -0500

Larry Sjaastad, professor emeritus of economics and a leading expert on trade in Latin America, died May 2. A resident of Hyde Park, he was 77.

Sjaastad made fundamental contributions to economics across a wide spectrum of topics including public finance, international economics and exchange rate theory.

“Larry’s teaching and the bonds he made with students have had a huge effect in Latin America,” said Jorge Garcia-Garcia, PhD’75, a senior evaluation officer with The World Bank. “His students now occupy important positions in government and academia, and as a result, his ideas have had a larger effect in those countries,”

“A good example of the influence of his research was Larry’s famous ‘shift coefficient,’ the share of import protection born by the country’s own exporters,” said Kenneth Clements, PhD’77, professor of economics at the University of Western Australia. “This explained clearly why countries that tax imports tend to have languishing export sectors. Exporters in Latin America and Australia in the 1980s were quick to realize the significance of this research for them.”

Sjaastad helped organize the Latin American Workshops at the University of Chicago. As a young scholar he developed an interest in Latin America when he directed a training program started in 1962 for Argentinian students in economics that was organized at the Universidad National de Cuyo as a joint program with professors from the University of Chicago. It was the first such program established through President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, which was intended to improve relations with Latin America.

He also was a visiting professor at universities in Chile, Colombia, Singapore, Western Australia and Brazil.

Sjaastad was born on a farm near Tagus, N.D. and enrolled in the North Dakota Agricultural College to study electrical engineering. He received a scholarship to attend UChicago, where he developed a passion for analytical, applied economics.

His publications in economics were significant from the beginning. After receiving his undergraduate degree in 1957, he continued as a graduate student in economics and received a PhD from UChicago in 1961. His doctoral thesis, a path-breaking extension of human capital theory into the study of migration decisions, was developed into an influential article, “The Costs and Returns of Human Migration,” which remains widely cited today.

The paper, published in the Journal of Political Economy, examined migration patterns in the United States in a comprehensive way. It sought to determine the social and personal costs of migration, in monetary and non-monetary terms, such as moving from to another state because of better living conditions.

The thesis also became legendary for students in UChicago’s Department of Economics.

“Larry's thesis on migration was held up by (former UChicago professor) Gregg Lewis and other teachers as a model dissertation for my class. It was a standard that few of us met,” said Nobel Prize winner Robert Lucas, the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at UChicago, who received a PhD from UChicago in 1964.

After briefly teaching at the University of Minnesota, Sjaastad in 1962 joined the UChicago faculty, where he remained until his retirement in 2004.

During his 42-year teaching career, Sjaastad supervised 139 doctoral dissertations and was a vital source of guidance and support for countless students. Known for his ability to present complex economic theory in a clear, accessible manner, Sjaastad set an example for excellence in teaching, former students said.

“He had a special gift of being able to understand people well and being able to help them, especially international students studying economics in the challenging intellectual environment that Chicago is so well known for,” Clements said,

In 2008, he received Norman Maclean Faculty Award, given by the University’s Alumni Association in recognition of his outstanding teaching.

When Sjaastad retired, he was presented with a work titled, “The Larry Sjaastad Letters,” which included expressions of gratitude and well wishes from former students, colleagues and friends. One former student eloquently summed up Sjaastad’s impact by urging him to “stick around because we are used to counting on you.”  

He is survived by his wife, Irene Glasner; and sons, Michael and John Sjaastad.

Chicago Booth's Epley wins award from American Psychological Association

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 12:00 -0600

Nicholas Epley, a social psychologist on the faculty of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, has been selected to receive the 2011 American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology in the area of social psychology.

The early career award honors researchers for contributions made during the first nine years after receiving their PhD. He is the first faculty member at a business school to receive the award since it was first given in 1974.

Epley, the John Templeton Keller Professor of Behavioral Science and John E. Jeuck Faculty Fellow at Chicago Booth, was recognized for his research on the experimental study of social cognition, perspective taking, and intuitive human judgment.

His research has appeared in more than two dozen journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, Psychological Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Epley’s most well known work includes “Feeling ‘Holier than thou’: Are self–serving assessments produced by errors in self or social prediction,” with D. Dunning published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, “Putting adjustment back in the anchoring and adjustment heuristic: Divergent processing of self–generated and experimenter–provided anchors,” with T. Gilovich published in Psychological Science, “Perspective taking as egocentric anchoring and adjustment,” with B. Keysar, L. Van Boven, and T. Gilovich published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and “On seeing human: A three–factor theory of anthropomorphism,” with A. Waytz and J. Cacioppo published in Psychological Review.

His recent work includes “How to seem telepathic: Enabling mind reading by matching self–construal,” with T. Eyal published in Psychological Science, “Mind Perception” with A. Waytz published in the Handbook of Social Psychology, and “The intentional mind and the hot hand: Perceiving intentions makes streaks seem likely to continue,” with E.M. Caruso and A. Waytz, published in Cognition.

Epley received the Theoretical Innovation Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in 2008 (with co–authors Adam Waytz and John Cacioppo.) He is an Associate Editor of Behavioral Science and Public Policy, and a consulting editor of the Journal of Personality and Society Psychology, Self and Identify, and Social Psychological and Personality Science.

“Most people are intuitive psychologists in their daily lives — wondering why people think or behave as they do,” Epley said. “I just happened to find a profession that enables me to answer these questions for a living.”

During the current academic quarter Epley is teaching a general management course for MBA students.

Epley joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 2005 after spending several years on the faculty in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He received a PhD in psychology from Cornell University and a bacehlor's in psychology and philosophy from Saint Olaf College.

He will receive the award from the American Psychological Association at the group’s annual convention Aug. 4-7 in Washington, D.C.