Associate Professor
Economic Analysis & Policy
Expert on antitrust economics
About
Matthew Backus is an associate professor in the Economic Analysis and Policy Group at Berkeley Haas. His focus is industrial organization, a field of economics that studies market power in its myriad forms. His research has touched on auctions, bargaining, cartels, communication, and productivity. A recurrent theme in his work is the development of tools that allow us to empirically distinguish between theoretical models of behavior.
Backus joined Berkeley from Columbia University, where he was an associate professor in the economics division of Columbia Business School. He is a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a research affiliate of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He has a PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan.
- Matthew Backus, Christopher Conlon, Michael Sinkinson. Common Ownership in America: 1980–2017. American Economic Journal: Microeconomics. 2021
- Matthew Backus. Why Is Productivity Correlated With Competition?. Econometrica.
2020 - Matthew Backus, Thomas Blake, Brad Larsen, Steven Tadelis. Sequential Bargaining in the Field: Evidence from Millions of Online Bargaining Interactions. The Quarterly Journal of Economics.
2020 - Matthew Backus, Andrew Little. I Don’t Know. American Political Science Review.
2020 - Matthew Backus, Thomas Blake, and Steven Tadelis. On the Empirical Content of Cheap-Talk Signaling: An Application to Bargaining. Journal of Political Economy.
2019
At Haas since 2021
- 2024 – present, Associate Professor, Economic Analysis and Policy, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley
- 2022 – 2024, Assistant Professor, Economic Analysis and Policy, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley
- 2021 – present, Visiting Assistant Professor, Economic Analysis and Policy, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley
- 2019 – present, Philip H. Geier Jr Associate Professor, Economics, Columbia Graduate School of Business
- 2018 – present, affiliated faculty member, Department of Economics, Columbia University
- 2015 – 2019, Assistant Professor, Economics, Columbia Graduate School of Business
- 2013 – 2015, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Cornell University
- 2016 — present, Faculty Research Fellow, National Bureau of Economic Research
- 2019 — present, Research Affiliate, Centre for Economic and Policy Research
- MBA201A: Economic Analysis for Business Decisions
- MBA/EWMBA 217: Antitrust