Kinkead Lecture in Economics
On March 4, 2026, the Department of Economics at the University of Illinois will host the Kinkead Lecture in Economics.
The Kinkead Lecture series is sponsored by the Kinkead Fund, which supports research on industrial organization, innovation, technological change, and market structure.
Joel Waldfogel is the Frederick R. Kappel Chair in Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. He is a research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research and of ZEW.
Professor Waldfogel was previously the Ehrenkranz Family Professor of Business and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he served as department chair and associate vice dean. Before Wharton, he was an associate professor of economics at Yale University. From 2017 to 2023, he served as associate dean for MBA and MS programs at the Carlson School.
His main research interests are industrial organization and law and economics, and has conducted empirical studies of price advertising, media markets, the operation of differentiated product markets, and issues related to digital products, including piracy, pricing, and revenue sharing. Professor Waldfogel has published more than 80 articles in leading scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the RAND Journal of Economics. He has also authored several books, including Digital Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 2018), The Tyranny of the Market: Why You Can't Always Get What You Want (Harvard University Press, 2007), and Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays (Princeton University Press, 2009).