Department of Economics hosting David Kaserman Memorial Lecture with Andrew Sweeting

Published: April 11, 2022

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On Thursday, April 21, at 5 p.m. in Lowder Hall room 19, the Department of Economics will host the David Kaserman Memorial Lecture, a program in honor of the late David Kaserman. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will feature Andrew Sweeting, a professor of economics at the University of Maryland, College Park, who will discuss contemporary topics in antitrust policy.

Sweeting received his doctoral degree in economics from MIT in 2004 and has held positions at Northwestern University and Duke University. He has been a Faculty Research Fellow and later a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, or NBER, since 2007.

His research covers a range of topics, including the effects of mergers on prices and product variety, how to quantify the constraints that potential entry and product repositioning will place on market power after mergers, the design of auctions, the identification of collusion in wholesale electricity markets, the welfare effects of targeted advertising and the effects of revenue management in secondary markets for event tickets. Sweeting’s research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and published in leading economics journals such as Econometrica, American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy and the RAND Journal of Economics.

Sweeting is currently editor of the RAND Journal of Economics, and a former editor of the Journal of Industrial Economics and a former foreign editor of the Review of Economic Studies. He founded and co-organizes the annual DC Industrial Organization Conference. He served as the Director of the Bureau of Economics at the Federal Trade Commission in 2020, and on the UK Competition Commission’s Academic Panel from 2007 to 2014.

Professor David L. Kaserman, 1947-2008, was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and remained spiritually an East Tennessean his entire life. After working his way through college at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, he attended graduate school at the University of Florida, where he began a life-long collaboration with Professor Roger Blair, an internationally recognized antitrust scholar.

Kaserman worked as an economist for the U.S. government at Housing and Urban Development, the Federal Trade Commission and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and served with great distinction on the faculties of the University of Tennessee and Auburn University. He published more than 100 articles, including influential papers on vertical integration and regulation in the American Economic Review, The Review of Economics and Statistics, The Journal of Law and Economics and many others. He authored numerous books, including “Antitrust Economics” through Oxford University Press, with Roger Blair, and the textbook “Government and Business: The Economics of Antitrust and Regulation” through Dryden Press, with John Mayo.

Kaserman suffered from congenital kidney disease, and endured years of dialysis before receiving a successful transplant. His experiences motivated him to work on behalf of kidney patients by analyzing global organ shortage in numerous articles, op-eds and seminars, culminating in the publication of “The Global Organ Shortage: Economic Causes, Human Consequences, Policy Responses” through Stanford Press, with T. Randolph Beard and Rigmar Osterkamp, which is posthumously dedicated to him.

Submitted by: Wendy Bonner