Jeffrey A. Jacobs Distinguished Professorship in Business and Technology, Emeritus
Business & Public Policy
Expert on the economics and politics of contracts and institutions
About
Pablo T. Spiller is the Jeffrey A. Jacobs Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Business & Technology, at the Haas School of Business, and Professor of Graduate Studies, UC Berkeley, Research Associate, NBER and Senior Consultant at Compass Lexecon, an international economic consulting company.
He has been at the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and of the University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign, and has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has been a Visiting Professor at Columbia Law School, NYU Law School, Universitè Paris I, Universidad de San Andrés and Tel Aviv University.
His research interests lie at the intersection of economics, politics, and the law. His current research is on the economics and politics of public contracting. His approach to public contracts is from a transactions cost rather than public policy perspective. As such, he analyzes the hazards inherent to public contracting that make their outer features and performance differ from pure private contracts. He has applied this approach to a variety of public contracting environments, such as utility regulation, the issuing of concessions, the organization of bureaucracies, the inner workings of public companies, and the like.
He was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, and was also on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Applied Economics, The Regulation Magazine, The Utilities Project, the Journal of Comparative Studies, the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, Economics and Politics, the Journal of Industrial Economics, and the Journal of Policy Reform. He was also Board Member of the American Law & Economics Association, the Institute for Transnational Arbitration, the University CEMA, and the Center for Global Prosperity.
He has consulted for the World Bank, the InterAmerican Bank, the UNDP and multiple governments and private companies throughout the world on the design and implementation of appropriate regulatory policies, contract design and implementation. He has testified in numerous international arbitrations involving contract, regulatory and investment disputes. He is the former President of the International Society for New Institutional Economics and was a Special Advisor to the Bureau of Economics of the US Federal Trade Commission.
Expertise and Research Interests
- Institutional analysis
- Political economy
- Positive political theory and the courts
- Industrial organization
- Political economy
- Economics of regulation and antitrust
- Regulatory issues in developing countries
- “The Organizational Implications of Creativity: The US Film Industry in Mid-XXth Century,” with Ricard Gil. California Management Review.
- “Strategic Judicial Decision Making,” with Rafael Gely, in Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics, edited by Keith E. Whittington, E. Daniel Kelemen and Gregory A. Caldeira. Oxford University Press.
- “Buy, Lobby or Sue: Interest Groups’ Participation in Policy Making – A Selective Survey,” with Sanny Liao, in New Institutional Economics, edited by Eric Brousseau and Jean-Michael Glachant. Cambridge University Press.
- The Institutional Foundations of Public Policy: The Case of Argentina, with Mariano Tommasi. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- “Airline Hubs: Costs, Markups and the Implications of Customer Heterogeneity,” in Advances in Airline Economics, edited by D. Lee. Elsevier B.V., 2006.
- “Judicial Lobbying: The Politics of Labor Law Constitutional Interpretation,” with M. Iaryczower and M. Tommasi. American Political Science Review 100, no. 1 (2006).
- “Instability and Public Policy Making in Argentina,” in The Politics of Institutional Weakness: Argentine Democracy in Comparative Perspective, edited by S. Levitsky and V. Murillo. 2006.
- “Institutional Changes in Emerging Markets: Implications for the Telecommunications Sector,” in vol. 2 of Handbook of Telecommunications Economics, edited by M. Cave, S. Majumdar and I. Vogelsang. 2006.
- “The Institutions of Regulation,” with M. Tommasi, in Handbook of Institutional Economics, edited by C. Menard and M. Shirley. 2005.
- Institutions, Contracts and Regulation in Argentina, with Manuel Abdala. Buenos Aires: Temas, 2000. (Translated into Spanish.)
- Spilled Water: Institutional Commitment in the Provision of Water Services in Latin America,edited with W. Savedoff. Interamerican Development Bank, 1999. (Translated into Spanish.)
- Regulación de los Sectores de Infraestructura y Energéticos en México, (Infrastructure and Energy Regulation in Mexico), edited with C. Sales. Mexico City: ITAM/Porrua Grupo Editorial, 1999.
- The Path Towards Rational Regulation in Latin America and the Caribbean: Issues, Concepts and Experience (Directions in Development), with J. Luis Guasch, in World Bank Directions in Development Series. 1999.
- Regulations, Institutions and Commitment:: A Comparative Analysis of Telecommunications Regulation, edited with Brian Levy. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- Strategy, Structure and Antitrust in the Carbonated Soft Drink Industry, with T. Muris and D. Scheffman. Quorum Books, 1993.
At Haas since 1995
2009 – present, President, International Society for New Institutional Economics
2003 – present, Jeffrey A. Jacobs Distinguished Professorship in Business and Technology
1995 – 2003 Joe Shoong Professor of International Business & Public Policy, Haas School of Business
1987 – 1993 William B. McKinley Professor of Economics and Public Utilities, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
1989 – 1993 Professor of Government and Public Affairs, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champain
1984 – 1987 Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
1980 – 1984 Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Pennsylvania
- Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Law, Economics and Organization
- Associate Editor, Journal of Comparative Economics
- Member, Board of Advisors, Center for Institutional Analysis, The Independent Institute, The Center on Global Prosperity, SSRN Advisory Board, Law and Positive Political theory
- Distinguished Research Fellow, SNF, Bergen, Norway
- Associate Editor: Journal of Applied Economics, Regulation Magazine, The Utility Project
- Consultant: The World Bank, InterAmerican Development Bank, Federal Trade Commission, Department of Transportation, Mexico Energy Regulation Commission, Mexico Antitrust Commission, United Nations Development Program, Ministry of Economics, Argentina, and Central Bank of Uruguay
- Featured in Who’s Who in Economics: A Bibliography Dictionary of Major Economists, 1700-1995, edited by Mark Blaug and Paul Sturges. Cambridge: MIT Press.
- Various NSF and other foundation grants.
- The Economics, Policy and Strategy of Media
- The Economics of Institutions