Jeffrey Robert Church

Dr. Church has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley and a B.A. (Honours) in Economics from the University of Calgary. He was the 1995-1996 T. D. MacDonald Chair in Industrial Economics at the Canadian Competition Bureau. His published research includes articles on merger simulation, network economics, strategic competition, entry deterrence, intellectual property rights, and competition policy. He is the coauthor of a book on the regulation of natural gas pipelines in Canada, a text in industrial organization, and a monograph for the European Commission on the competitive impacts of vertical and conglomerate mergers. He has acted as an expert on regulatory and competition policy matters.

My research interests are in the field of industrial organization, with an emphasis on network externalities, competition policy, and regulatory economics. Neil Gandal (Tel Aviv University) and I have a long-standing research programme investigating network externalities in systems composed of a hardware good that requires complementary software—the production of which is characterized by long-run fixed costs and for which consumers have a taste for variety. Recent work in this area considers the relationship between indirect network effects and network externalities and the pricing and introduction of competitive software upgrades. Research projects in competition policy include the role of entry in merger analysis; the implications of network externalities, innovation, and intellectual property rights for competition policy; the impact of changes in market structure on the effectiveness of tacit collusion; the use of different demand systems and estimation of the statistical significance of price changes in unilateral merger analysis; and antitrust analysis of vertical and conglomerate mergers. Research projects in regulatory economics include optimal tolling on multicommodity oil pipelines and the economics of Alberta's unique approach to electricity restructuring.