Glenn Harrison is the C.V. Starr Chair of Risk Management & Insurance and Director of the Center for the Economic Analysis of Risk (CEAR), in the Department of Risk Management & Insurance, J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University. He has over 160 academic publications, including general journals such as Econometrica, American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of the American Statistical Association, and the American Journal of Public Health, and specialist journals such as the World Bank Economic Review, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of African Economies, Journal of Environmental Economics & Management, Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Law & Economics, Experimental Economics, Journal of Economic Methodology and Economics & Philosophy. His current research interests include risk and uncertainty, time preferences, subjective beliefs, experimental economics, development economics, and the economics of the first world poor.
His work in experimental economics has included the study of bidding behavior in auctions, market contestability and regulation, bargaining behavior, and the elicitation of risk and time preferences. Most recently it has examined the complementarity of laboratory and field experiments. His work in law and economics has centered on the calculation of compensatory damages in tobacco litigation, including testifying for plaintiffs in the Medicaid litigation that resulted in a settlement worth over $200 billion. Most recently he has worked on the relationship between compensatory and punitive damages, and class actions involving the excessive promotion of certain drugs, the risk of environmental contamination, and the regulation of occupational risk. His work in international trade policy has employed computable general equilibrium models to quantify the effects of unilateral, regional and multilateral trade reforms. A particular focus of this policy analysis has been to assess the effects of trade reform on poor households in developing countries. His work in environmental economics has included modeling the effects of alternative policies to mitigate global warming, critiques of casual applications of the contingent valuation method, and improved methods of damage assessment. Most recently he has focused on the formal characterization of environmental reform as a “policy lottery” that properly reflects uncertainty in predicted effects on households.
Professor Harrison has been a consultant for numerous government agencies and private bodies. These include the World Bank (evaluating trade policy reforms for developing countries), the Swedish government and the United States Environmental Protection Agency (evaluating carbon tax proposals), the Danish government (evaluating tax and deregulation policies), and counsel representing parties suing for economic damages. Professor Harrison is a Pisces, and loves red wine, one Swedish woman, and one American daughter. Before academic life, Professor Harrison played Australian “no-rules” football for Hawthorn in the Australian Football League, kicking one goal in his career.
He was an IZA Research Fellow from August 2013 until June 2016.
