Authors

Chad Syverson

Eli B. and Harriet B. Williams Professor of Economics

University of Chicago Booth School of Business

CHAD SYVERSON is the Eli B. and Harriet B. Williams Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He has been on the University of Chicago faculty since 2001. His research spans several topics, with a particular focus on the interactions of firm structure, market structure, and productivity. He has authored or coauthored dozens of scholarly articles and is the coauthor (with Austan Goolsbee and Steve Levitt) of intermediate-level textbook, Microeconomics. Syverson is an editor of the Rand Journal of Economics, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and has served on multiple National Academies committees. Syverson earned two bachelor’s degrees from the University of North Dakota in 1996, one in economics and one in mechanical engineering. After a brief stint working as a mechanical engineer for Unisys Corporation and Loral Defense Systems, he went on to earn a PhD in economics from the University of Maryland in 2001.

Publications

Creating Economic Opportunity for More Americans Through Productivity Growth

The U.S. economy in recent years has been characterized by slow average productivity growth and increasing productivity dispersion within industries. In this essay, author Chad Syverson discusses research into the potential causes of these patterns and outlines several policy changes that would yield expected productivity and wage benefits under general conditions.