Joe S. Bain

Joe S. Bain (July, 4, 1912, Spokane, Washington, USA - September 7, 1991, Columbus, Ohio) was an American economist, and can be seen as one of the founders of industrial economics.

He identified and quantified ‘barriers to entry’ into imperfectly competitive industries by measuring factors such as initial capital requirements, threat of price cutting by established firms, and product differentiation. He obtained a Ph. D. from Harvard University. Except for one year (1951–2) in that university, his entire career was spent teaching at the University of California, Berkeley (1939–75).

His early research interests centered on the economic performance of the Pacific Coast petroleum industry and resulted in the publication of three path-breaking volumes between 1944 and 1947, that have been described as “a landmark in the application and empirical testing of the hypotheses of microeconomic theory with respect to the interrelationships between an industry's structure, conduct, and performance.”

His path-breaking text "Barriers to New Competition" (1956) offered “the possibility of new, determinate solutions to the oligopoly problem, and adding important new insights into the relationship between industry and structure, behavior and performance,” followed by his classic text "Industrial Organization" (1959), which “gave the field the rationale and structure that it retains to this day.”

In the 1960s, Joe served as project director of a study of the California water industry, culminating in the 1966 publication, authored jointly with Richard Caves and Julius Margolis, of "Northern California's Water Industry: The Comparative Efficiency of Public Enterprise in Developing a Scarce Natural Resource". Here again is an example of his remarkable ability to pick research areas with long-lasting, escalating policy significance. The same applies to his 1973 book on "Environmental Decay--Economic Causes and Remedies".

In 1982 Joe received the signal honor of being elected a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association, which described him as “the undisputed father of modern Industrial Organization Economics.”

Major Works

*"The Profit Rate as Measure of Monopoly Power", 1941, "QJE"
*"Market Classifications in Modern Price Theory", 1942, "QJE"
*"The Economics of the Pacific Coast Petroleum Industry", 1944.
*"Pricing, Distribution and Employment: Economics of an enterprise system", 1948.
*"A Note on Pricing in Monopoly and Oligopoly", 1949, "AER"
*"Relation of Profit Rate to Industry Concentration: American manufacturing, 1936-40", 1951, "QJE"
*"Conditions of Entry and the Emergence of Monopoly", 1954, in Chamberlin, editor, "Monopoly and Competition"
*"Economies of Scale, Concentration and the Condition of Entry in Twenty Manufacturing Industries", 1954, "AER"
*"Barriers to New Competition: their character and consequences in manufacturing industries", 1956.
*"Industrial Organization", 1959.
*"Chamberlin's Impact on Microeconomic Theory", in Kuenne, editor, "Monopolistic Competition Theory"
*"International Differences in Industrial Structure", 1966
*"Northern California's Water Industry", with R.E. Caves and J. Margolis, 1966.
*"Essays on Economic Development", 1970.
*"Essays on Price Theory and Industrial Organization", 1972.
*"Environmental Decay: Economic causes and remedies", 1973.
*"Structure versus Conduct as Indicators of Market Performance", 1986, "Antitrust Law and Econ Rev"
*"Industrial Organization: a treatise", with T.D. Qualls, 1987.

External links

* [http://cepa.newschool.edu/het Profile of Joe S. Bain] at the [http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/home.htm History of Economic Thought website] .
* [http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=hb7c6007sj&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00002&toc.depth=1&toc.id= Obituary of Joe S. Bain by Frederick E. Balderston and George F. Break]