Carlton will supervise all economic analysis in U.S. Department of Justice

Dennis Carlton, Professor of Economics in the Graduate School of Business, has been appointed to the U.S. Department of Justice antitrust division as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economic Analysis.

Carlton will supervise all economic analysis within the antitrust division and direct the division’s economic analysis group. He will take a leave of absence from the University while he serves in Washington, beginning in October.

“Dennis has a deep commitment to the application of economics to antitrust policy and antitrust enforcement,” said Edward Snyder, Dean of the GSB and the George Pratt Shultz Professor of Economics. “He has contributed significantly to the relevant academic literature and worked directly on important issues concerning economics and policy for nearly 30 years. He will no doubt make significant contributions to the Justice Department’s mission,” Snyder said.

Carlton, who joined the Chicago faculty in 1984, specializes in industrial organization and theoretical and applied economics. He teaches courses in microeconomics for M.B.A. students and advanced industrial organization for Ph.D. students.

Earlier in his career, Carlton taught in the University’s Law School and the Department of Economics, as well as at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1977, Carlton has been associated with Lexecon, an economics consulting firm, where he served as president from 1997 to 2001 and currently serves as senior managing director.

Carlton has written numerous articles on market behavior and antitrust issues and has served as co-editor of The Journal of Law and Economics since 1980. In 1990, he co-authored Modern Industrial Organization, which has since been translated into four languages and is now in its fourth edition. His economic expertise also has been requested on a wide range of industry matters, including transportation, utilities and telecommunications.

In June 2006, Carlton was a featured speaker at the inaugural session of the joint public hearings presented by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, which are examining the antitrust treatment of single-firm conduct. He is currently the sole economist serving on the Antitrust Modernization Commission, a Congressional commission examining U.S. antitrust laws. He also served as a consultant on the Horizontal Merger Guidelines for the Department of Justice from 1991 to 1992.

Carlton graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1972 with an A.B. in applied mathematics and economics. At MIT, he received an M.A. in operations research in 1974 and a Ph.D. in economics in 1975.