Lanier Benkard

The Gregor G. Peterson Professor of Economics

Robert & Marilyn Jaedicke Faculty Fellow for 2012-2013

Phone: (650) 725-2173

Email: [email protected]

Academic Areas: Economics

Professor Benkard’s research is in the areas of industrial organization, applied microeconomics, and econometrics. His research involves applying microeconomic and game theoretic models to the study of individual markets. His recent work has focused on empirical applications of dynamic oligopoly, and he has recently studied the commercial aircraft and personal computer industries.

Bio

C. Lanier Benkard is a Professor of Economics (with tenure) at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches courses in Industrial Organization and Econometrics. Before coming to Stanford in 1998, he received his PhD in Economics from Yale University (1998). He has also been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (2005-6) and the University of California at Berkeley (2006).

Professor Benkard’s research is in the areas of empirical industrial organization (I.O.), applied microeconomics, and econometrics, and concentrates on applying microeconomic and game theoretic models to the study of individual markets. His recent work has focused on developing methods that allow us to analyze I.O. models empirically. This includes theoretical work on how to estimate demand systems and dynamic oligopoly models, as well as empirical work that uses these techniques to analyze different industries. The recent empirical work includes studies of learning by doing in the commercial aircraft industry, and studies of personal computer prices and the demand for personal computers.

Professor Benkard is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and is an associate editor for the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control. He is a member of the American Economic Association and the Econometric Society, and has organized conferences for numerous other professional organizations, including the EEA, INFORMS, NBER, SCE, and SITE.

At Stanford, Benkard teaches a course on applied statistics and decision theory in the first year MBA core, as well as PhD courses in Econometrics and Industrial Organization. He also advises PhD students, and several of his former students are now faculty at leading economics departments and business schools.

Academic Degrees

PhD, MPhil, Yale Univ., 1996, MA, Univ. of Toronto, 1991, BSc, 1990.

Professional Experience

At Stanford since 1998.

Assoc. Economist, Wefa Inc., 1991-93.

Selected Publications

  • A Dynamic Analysis of the Market for Wide-Bodied Commercial Aircraft,: Review of Economic Studies, 2004
  • Hedonic Price Indexes with Unobserved Product Characteristics and Application to PCs,: Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 2004
  • Learning and Forgetting: The Dynamics of Aircraft Production,: American Economic Review, 2000

Working Papers

  • 1691: Demand Estimation with Heterogeneous Consumers and Unobserved Product Characteristics: A Hedonic Approach
  • 1710: Discrete Choice Models as Structural Models of Demand: Some Economic Implications of Common Approaches
  • 1560: Learning and Forgetting: The Dynamics of Aircraft Production
  • 1636: A Dynamic Analysis of the Market for Wide-Bodied Commercial Aircraft
  • 1840: House Prices and Consumer Welfare
  • 1841: Hedonic Price Indexes with Unobserved Product Characteristics, and Application to PC's
  • 1842: Demand Estimation With Heterogeneous Consumers and Unobserved Product Characteristics: A Hedonic Approach
  • 1852R1: Estimating Dynamic Models of Imperfect Competition
  • 1868R: On the Nonparametric Identification of Nonlinear Simultaneous Equations Models: Comments on B. Brown (1983) and Roehrig (1988)*
  • 1919R: Markov Perfect Industry Dynamics with Many Firms
  • 1969: Computational Methods for Oblivious Equilibrium

Courses Taught

Affiliations

  • Faculty Research Fellow: NBER (1901 - present)
  • Member: American Economic Assn.,Econometrics Society (1901 - present)

In The Media

  • Use It or Lose It: Learning on the Manufacturing Line, Stanford Business Magazine