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Strategy

Elinor Hobbs Professor of International Business, Professor of Strategy

Professor of Law, Northwestern University School of Law (Courtesy)

Portrait of Daniel Spulber, Faculty at the Kellogg School of Management

Daniel F. Spulber is the Elinor Hobbs Distinguished Professor of International Business and Professor of Strategy at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, where he has taught since 1990. He is also Professor of Law (Courtesy) at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. Spulber received his Ph.D. in economics in 1979 and his M.A. in economics in 1976 from Northwestern University and his B.A. in economics in 1974 from the University of Michigan. Prior to Northwestern University, Spulber taught at Brown University, the University of Southern California, and Cal Tech.

 

Spulber’s economics expert witness consulting experience is in Antitrust, Platforms and Two-Sided Markets, Intellectual Property, Technology and Innovation, and Industrial Organization. Spulber has provided economics expert witness testimony before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the International Trade Commission (ITC), the Copyright Royalty Board, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the Postal Rate Commission, and state regulatory agencies including the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC), the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission, and the Wisconsin Public Service Commission. Spulber provided expert testimony before the Superior Court for the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, and the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Spulber’s research has been cited by the Supreme Court of the United States.

 

Spulber has organized 33 law and economics conferences on innovation and entrepreneurship. He has spoken at events organized by USPTO, The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, The General Accountability Office (GAO), The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, The Technology Policy Institute, Oracle, and The Global Competition Review. He has received 37 research grants, including the National Science Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and the USPTO.

 

Spulber served as the Research Director of the Northwestern University Center on Law, Business, and Economics at the Pritzker School of Law. He also served as the founding Director of Kellogg’s International Business & Markets Program. Spulber is the founding editor of the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley. He is the author of fourteen books including The Case for Patents, World Scientific Publishing, 2021. Spulber has published numerous articles in leading economics journals and law reviews.

 

Spulber is the winner of the 2023 Antitrust Writing Awards: Academic Articles, Economics. Spulber was ranked 140th among economists by number of journal pages weighted by number of authors, as of January 2024, https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.anbpages.html. He was highly ranked for 1979-2003 adjusted appearances in The Most Frequent Contributors to the Elite Economics Journals: Half Century of Contributions to the ‘Blue Ribbon Eight’, J. L. Heck and P. A. Zaleski, Journal of Economics and Finance, 9, Spring, 2006, pp. 1-37. Spulber was ranked 6th among economists in the United States in Trends in Rankings of Economics Departments in the U.S.: An Update, L. C. Scott and P. M. Mitias, Economic Inquiry, 34, April 1996, pp. 378-400.

 

About Daniel
Research interests
  • Antitrust
  • Innovation Economics
  • Microeconomics
  • Theory of the Firm
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Industrial Organization
  • International Economics
  • Law and Economics
  • Management Strategy.
Teaching interests
  • International Business Strategy
  • Innovation Economics
  • PhD, 1979, Economics, Northwestern University
    MA, 1976, Economics, Northwestern University
    BA, 1974, Economics, University of Michigan
  • Elinor Hobbs Distinguished Professor of International Business, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2000-present
    Research Director, Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth, Pritzker School of Law, Northwestern University, 2010-present
    Professor (Courtesy), Pritzker School of Law, Northwestern University, 2000-present
    Professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 1993-present
    Professor of Management and Strategy, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 1990-present
    Founding Director, International Business & Markets Program, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2001-2006
    Thomas G. Ayers Chair in Energy Resource Management, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 1990-2000
    Visiting Professor of Economics, California Institute of Technology, 1989
    Professor of Economics and Law, University of Southern California Law Center, 1988-1990
    Professor of Economics, University of Southern California, 1988-1990
    Visiting Associate Professor of Economics, California Institute of Technology, 1988
    Associate Professor of Economics, University of Southern California, 1984-1988
    Research Associate, Institute for Marine and Coastal Studies, University of Southern California, 1982-1984
    Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Southern California, 1982-1984
    Assistant Professor of Economics, Brown University, 1978-1982
  • Winner, 2023, Antitrust Writing Awards: Academic Articles, Economics, Concurrences and and The George Washington University Law School’s Competition Law Center
    Winner, 2023, Antitrust Writing Awards: Academic Articles, Economics, https://awards.concurrences.com/en/awards/2023/academic-articles/antitrust-and-innovation-competition, Concurrences
    Bayard Wickliffe Heath Memorial Lecture, University of Florida Law School, University of Florida, 2019
    Bonser Distinguished Lecture at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, 2003
    Bayard Wickliffe Heath Memorial Lecture, University of Florida Law School
    Sidney J. Levy Teaching Award, Kellogg School of Management, 1995-1996
  • Board of Editors, Journal of Strategic Management Education, 2004-Present
    Founding Editor, Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, 1991-Present
    Guest Editor, American Economic Review, 1980
    Guest Editor, Journal of Competition Law and Economics, Special Issue on Innovation Economics and Technology Standards, 1969-2013

Research in Economics (MECS-560-3)

This course introduces first-year PhD students to the economics research environment. With an emphasis on breadth, and minimal prerequisite knowledge at the graduate level, students are exposed to the process of forming and answering research questions. The course involves multiple faculty providing their perspective on successful approaches to research by highlighting significant recent works in their respective fields of interest.

Technology and Innovation Economics (MECS-549-1)

This is an empirical course on Technology and Innovation Economics. The course identifies many significant sources of data. The course provides a guide to developing economic models and formulating hypotheses that can be implemented for empirical analysis. The course demonstrates how to go from modeling and hypotheses to gathering and presenting data, conducting empirical analysis, and analyzing and interpreting empirical results. The course introduces Innovation Economics and its applications in industrial organization, strategic management, finance, marketing, entrepreneurship, managerial economics, and microeconomics. Topics include empirical analysis of Research and Development (R&D), Innovation, Markets for Technology, Platforms and Multi-Sided Markets, Internet Economics, Adoption and Diffusion of Technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Intellectual Property (IP) (patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets), creative destruction and dominant designs, and markets for technology.