Economics Chair Appointed

Donald Siegel, a distinguished professor in England, has been named chair of the Department of Economics at Rensselaer.

Thomas Griffin

Siegel was professor of industrial economics at the University of Nottingham in England. His research interests are the economics of technological change, university technology transfer, productivity analysis, and corporate social responsibility.

Siegel is an adviser to a National Academy of Sciences committee that is evaluating the Small Business Innovation Research Program across federal agencies. He is an editor of the Journal of Technology Transfer, an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the managerial and policy implications of technology transfer. Siegel also will be co-editing special issues of other journals on the economics of intellectual property at universities, science parks and incubators, and the economics of corporate social responsibility.

Siegel, who grew up in Brooklyn, received his bachelor's degree in economics and master's and doctoral degrees in business economics from Columbia University. He has served as a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, the world's leading economic research organization. He was an assistant professor at SUNY-Stony Brook and a full professor at Arizona State University.

His research has appeared in top journals in economics and management, such as the American Economic Review, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Academy of Management Review, and Academy of Management Journal. He has written or co-written three books: Skill-Biased Technological Change, Economics of Science and Technology, and Technological Change and Economic Performance.