Franklin M. Fisher Biography

FRANKLIN M. FISHER

Franklin M. Fisher, Ph.D., is the Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton Professor of Microeconomics, Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for 44 years. He received the Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1960, and, in 2001, he received an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has served as a director of CRA International since 1967 and as chairman or vice-chairman of the board of directors since 1997. In addition to MIT, Professor Fisher has taught at Harvard University, University of Chicago, Oxford, the University of Canterbury, Hebrew University, and Tel Aviv University. He is a director of the National Bureau of Economic Research and has served as an associate editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association and the Review of Economic Studies, and as editor of Econometrica. Professor Fisher is also a past President of the Econometric Society and a recipient of the John Bates Clark award of the American Economic Association.

Professor Fisher is the author or senior co-author of 17 books and over 150 articles in the area of economics. His book, Industrial Organization, Economics and the Law, widely read by lawyers and economists alike, is a collection of Professor Fisher's works that have a particular emphasis on antitrust issues. Many of the articles relate to topics that he examined in the course of his various consulting projects. For more than 30 years, Professor Fisher has served as an expert witness in matters involving antitrust, contract disputes, valuation, damages, and trademark infringement. He was IBM's chief economic witness in its antitrust cases of the 1970s and served in a similar role on behalf of the Department of Justice in the Microsoft antitrust case.

For the past 15 years, Professor Fisher has been the Chair of an Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian, Dutch and American project on the economics of water, especially in the Middle East. He is the senior author of the project's book, Liquid Assets: An Economic Approach for Water Management and Conflict Resolution in the Middle East and Beyond.