Holger Sieg Named Baird Term Professor of Economics

Holger Sieg has been named the Baird Term Professor of Economics. Sieg, who has also been a National Bureau of Economic Research research affiliate in public economics and political economy since 2000, focuses his research on public and urban economics, as well as the political economy of state and local governments.

Sieg is primarily known for providing rigorous foundations for structural estimation and has fundamentally shaped understanding of decentralized governments and fiscal federalism. In particular, he has made fundamental theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of equilibrium models of local jurisdictions. These models are used to characterize collective choices of public goods via majority rule and residential sorting of households in a system of communities or neighborhoods. Sieg is the author of the innovative textbook Urban Economics and Fiscal Policy.

Sieg's research has also provided new insights into access to and affordability of higher education, as well as the impact of affirmative action and financial aid policies. Most recently, his research has focused on the role of adverse selection and moral hazard in mayoral and gubernatorial elections. He has also developed new methods for estimating dynamic games of political competition with imperfect monitoring. This research has led to the development of new measures of policy responsiveness and characterized the impact of term limits on electoral competition and voters’ welfare.

The Baird Endowed Term Chair was established by anonymous donors in 2005.