Joel Waldfogel

Joel Waldfogel is the Frederick R. Kappel Chair in Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, an affiliated faculty member at both Minnesota’s Department of Economics and Law School, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Before coming to Carlson, Waldfogel was at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School (1997-2010), where he was the Ehrenkranz Family Professor of Business and Public Policy and had served as department chair and associate vice dean. Between 1990 and 1997, he was an assistant and later an associate professor of economics at Yale University.

Joel's main broad research interests are industrial organization and law and economics. He has conducted empirical studies of price advertising, media markets, the operation of differentiated product markets, and issues related to digital products, including piracy, pricing, revenue sharing, and the effects of digitization on the supply of new products.

Most of his research since 2004 has focused on copyright-related issues. He has published papers on the impact of piracy on the revenue of authorized products in recorded music, motion pictures, and television. Since 2010 he has done research, and has published papers, on the broader impacts of digitization on the supply of new products in creative industries.

He has published over 50 articles in scholarly outlets including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the RAND Journal of Economics. He has published two books, The Tyranny of the Market: Why You Can’t Always Get What You Want (Harvard University Press, 2007) and Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays (Princeton University Press, 2009). He has also written for Slate. Joel is a co-editor of the Handbook of Media Economics and also co-edited the 2012 Oxford Handbook of the Digital Economy.

Joel teaches the managerial economics course in Carlson's MBA core and developed one of the first online courses in Carlson's MBA program.