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I was more than a little bit pleased on Monday to learn that Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai has appointed Pepperdine Law School Professor and AEI Visiting Scholar Babette Boliek to the post of Chief Economist.
Professor Boliek joins an elite group: Former chief economists include the likes of Jonathan Baker, Michelle Connolly, Michael Katz, Gerry Faulhaber, Tom Hazlett, and Leslie Marx — all of whom now hold distinguished academic posts at prominent universities and have made important contributions to the economic analysis of government regulation and antitrust policy. Her immediate predecessor, Jerry Ellig, is not only an accomplished scholar but has played a central role in starting a transition that Professor Boliek will now have the task of completing: bringing together many of the Commission’s 50 or so professional economists into a new Office of Economics and Analytics that will, as Chairman Pai said in announcing the appointment, “better integrate economic analysis” into the agency’s work so that it can “make well-informed decisions that reflect basic principles of economics.”
Perhaps surprisingly, the creation of the new office has been a little controversial. One former chief economist, for example, argued that it would be better to leave economists embedded in the various bureaus where they can collaborate directly with the lawyers (who are “really” in charge), and that putting them in a separate office risks relegating them to the bureaucratic equivalent of Siberia.
While the “Siberia effect” is a valid concern in theory, the FCC Order establishing the new office makes it unlikely by giving it real bureaucratic “throw weight,” including specific responsibility for overseeing spectrum auctions and a requirement that the office review every rulemaking before it is released to the public and conduct a formal benefit-cost analysis of all major rules. In short, the Office of Economics and Analytics has a fighting chance to ensure that future FCC decisions are made through multidisciplinary collaboration in which economic analysis plays a significant role. That has often been the case at the Federal Trade Commission, whose Bureau of Economics dates to 1915.
Professor Boliek is uniquely qualified to advance this cause: In addition to her Ph.D. in economics from University of California, Davis, she holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School. In the late 1990s she was a Senior Fellow at George Mason University Law School’s Information Economy Project, a bastion of law and economics scholarship. Her professional writings, which are extensive, cover topics ranging from the economics of competition policy to constitutional law and the First Amendment — with a healthy dose of sports law thrown in. (See her AEI scholar page for some samples of her work.)
As all of us who have been her colleagues at AEI know, Babette embodies a powerful combination of strong free market principles, fact-driven economic analysis, and a sophisticated understanding of the law. As it moves to elevate the role of economic analysis in its decision making, that’s exactly what the FCC needs. Huzzah!
As all of us who have been her colleagues at AEI know, Babette embodies a powerful combination of strong free market principles, fact-driven economic analysis, and a sophisticated understanding of the law.
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