For my faculty interview I spoke with Professor Richard Gilbert.  Professor Gilbert specializes in the field of Industrial Organization.  In particular, his interest lies in the areas of antitrust economics, research and development, and intellectual property issues.

 Professor Gilbert has researched intellectual property issues and their influence on research and development.  He has questioned the ways in which firms interact with each other.  He has also studied competition in the market for research and development and asked how this market differs from competition in goods and services markets.  He has also studied price shifts in the gasoline market and asked what motivated these changes in price.

 These questions were all chosen because they are genuinely interesting to him.  Professor Gilbert has also worked with the Department of Justice in many antitrust matters.  Questions related to gasoline supply and demand contain lots of data.  Professor Gilbert emphasized the importance of not just knowing whether, based on data, prices are rising or falling, but why prices are changing and whether they are changing for the correct reasons.

 There is an overwhelming amount of data available on gasoline supply and demand.  The other areas Professor Gilbert has studied are less data-intensive because they deal with legal issues.  For antitrust and intellectual property matters, he found data by reading over numerous case studies.

 Professor Gilbert is accepting undergraduate advisees, however, the research topics must be relevant to his areas of interest.  Also keep in mind that he is the Department Chair so his time is somewhat limited.
 

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Professor Richard Gilbert. Professor Gilbert has taught courses in the Economic department and at the Haas School of Business. From 1993-1995 he was the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economics in the Antitrust Division for the U.S. Department of Justice.

As a Ph.D. student at Stanford University, Professor Gilbert wrote his thesis on the Theory of Exhaustible Resources (oil).  Currently, Professor Gilbert is working on an article entitled “Antitrust Policy for the Licensing of Intellectual Property.”  When asked how he chooses his topic of research he answered, “I choose what interests me and what I’m good at.”  Other topics that interest him include regulation, patents, and copyrights.  To write a successful paper, Professor Gilbert believes that you must have a good question: “You can work a lot on an uninteresting question, but you’ll get the answer and people don’t care.” His advice to students writing an honor’s thesis is to “explore a number of ideas and to always keep working at it.”

As for data, Professor Gilbert is lucky enough to still be in the “Washington Loop” and has the resources to know what cases (antitrust cases) are “hot.”  When researching topics such as gasoline, he either uses data sets that are free or purchases data sets that can cost up to $10,000.  When running regressions, Professor Gilbert prefers to use Excel when the data is simple, SAS when the data is more involved, and TSP when the data is somewhere in between.

I think that Professor Gilbert would be a great thesis advisor for anyone.  He is very helpful and has a great deal of resources that he can share with students.

        He finds a researchable question by looking at the literature and seeing what is important. To find a viable topic,
Professor Gilbert asks if the problem interesting. Is the data available? Can I produce an empirical answer? Once a topic is
chosen, Professor Gilbert bases his research of the subject matter on the topic. Sometimes he goes to legal libraries and
other times he analyzes government statistics.  For theoretical work, he looks at the literature.  Professor Gilbert stresses that
Cal has many sources for a researching economist depending on one's field of interest.

         Professor Gilbert is available as a thesis advisor for anyone interested in IO, Law and Economics- especially
intellectual property rights, and Regulation.