Stephen Salant
Professor Emeritus | University of Michigan
Stephen Salant (BA, Columbia; PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is an applied microtheorist specializing in natural resource economics. In the 1970s, he worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Federal Reserve Board, and Federal Trade Commission. Before joining the University of Michigan as a full professor (1986-2015), he served as the first co-editor of The Rand Journal of Economics. His other research on the oil market and on price ceilings include extensions of the Hotelling model to account for (1) cartel/oligopolistic industry structures, (2) arbitrary spatial configurations of extractors and their customers and (3) the fact that an oil well, once drilled, produces oil over many years. He has also shown that price ceilings (or pegs) defended by bufferstock sales inevitably cause speculative attacks—an insight quickly developed in the international finance literature.