UW Madison Public Affairs: Market Based Solutions to Societal Challenges
Opening for Assistant Professor of Public Policy (Market-Based Solutions to Societal Challenges)
The La Follette School of Public Affairs (LFS) seeks to hire a scholar whose research examines how market-based institutions, competitive structures, and incentive-compatible policy design can address major societal challenges. The successful candidate will conduct theoretically grounded and empirically rigorous research on the role of markets in domains traditionally shaped by public policy, regulation, or collective action problems.
We are particularly interested in scholars who analyze how prices, property rights, competition, decentralized information, and institutional design affect outcomes in areas such as:
Education/school finance and school choice
Financial regulation and capital markets
Housing supply and land-use reform
Technology policy and innovation markets
Transportation and infrastructure finance
International trade and tariffs*
State and local economic development
Climate and environmental policy (e.g., carbon pricing, cap-and-trade systems)
Energy markets and grid reform
Agricultural policy and food systems
The candidate may be an economist, political scientist, public policy scholar, legal scholar, or affiliated social scientist whose work engages deeply with the economic logic of markets and institutional design. We welcome scholars using diverse methodological approaches, including structural modeling, reduced-form econometrics, field experiments, institutional analysis, and political economy frameworks.
The successful candidate will contribute to teaching in public policy analysis, microeconomics for policy, regulatory policy, and sector-specific policy courses. They will strengthen LFS’s capacity to train students to evaluate when markets succeed, when they fail, how policy can improve their functioning, and how government failure represents an omnipresent risk.
Required Qualifications:
Applicants should demonstrate excellence and productivity in research and a commitment to teaching. The successful candidate will demonstrate experience fostering or the ability to foster teaching, learning, mentoring, departmental, and a research environment where all can thrive. Candidates should also demonstrate potential for interdisciplinary collaboration across departments and with various research centers.
Education:
Must have a Ph.D. in Public Policy, Public Administration, Political Science, Law, Economics, Sociology, or a related field by the start of appointment.
Applications due by October 18. Full details here .
* I’m editorializing – I think we need as many “market based” solutions for international trade issues as we can get! But all research areas are welcome.