Opening for Assistant Professor of Public Policy (Market-Based Solutions to Societal Challenges)
The La Follette School of Public Affairs (LFS) seeks to hire a scholar whose research examines how market-based institutions, competitive structures, and incentive-compatible policy design can address major societal challenges. The successful candidate will conduct theoretically grounded and empirically rigorous research on the role of markets in domains traditionally shaped by public policy, regulation, or collective action problems.
We are particularly interested in scholars who analyze how prices, property rights, competition, decentralized information, and institutional design affect outcomes in areas such as:
- Education/school finance and school choice
- Financial regulation and capital markets
- Housing supply and land-use reform
- Technology policy and innovation markets
- Transportation and infrastructure finance
- International trade and tariffs*
- State and local economic development
- Climate and environmental policy (e.g., carbon pricing, cap-and-trade systems)
- Energy markets and grid reform
- Agricultural policy and food systems
The candidate may be an economist, political scientist, public policy scholar, legal scholar, or affiliated social scientist whose work engages deeply with the economic logic of markets and institutional design. We welcome scholars using diverse methodological approaches, including structural modeling, reduced-form econometrics, field experiments, institutional analysis, and political economy frameworks.
The successful candidate will contribute to teaching in public policy analysis, microeconomics for policy, regulatory policy, and sector-specific policy courses. They will strengthen LFS’s capacity to train students to evaluate when markets succeed, when they fail, how policy can improve their functioning, and how government failure represents an omnipresent risk.
Required Qualifications:
Applicants should demonstrate excellence and productivity in research and a commitment to teaching. The successful candidate will demonstrate experience fostering or the ability to foster teaching, learning, mentoring, departmental, and a research environment where all can thrive. Candidates should also demonstrate potential for interdisciplinary collaboration across departments and with various research centers.
Education:
Must have a Ph.D. in Public Policy, Public Administration, Political Science, Law, Economics, Sociology, or a related field by the start of appointment.
Applications due by October 18. Full details here.
* I’m editorializing – I think we need as many “market based” solutions for international trade issues as we can get! But all research areas are welcome.
Off topic – this has been un the works for about a month:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/iran-backed-houthis-capture-mocha-204212804.html
Houthis have taken control of the city of Mocha in Yemen. Mocha us at the choke point of Bab-el-Mandeb, the strait at the southern exit of the Red Sea. Houthis have also reportedly taken Perim Island, which is in the strait. This helps solidify their control of the Bad-el-Mandeb, through which about 3 million barrels of Saudi oil had been transiting each day prior to August. Now, its more like 300,000 bbls because of Houti threats to shipping.
It probably goes without saying, but the conflict in Yemen is the direct result of our war on Iran, a war of choice.
Off topic – the FOMC meets next week. As of today, futires price in 87% odds of a 25 basis point hike. A week ago, that was 59%, a month ago, 48%.
What has happened in that time? One decent jobs report and a roughly 16% rise in WTI as the result of an entirely avoidable escalation in violence around the Persian Gulf. That’s about it.