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