Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Division of Applied Social Sciences
Director
Center for Rural Energy Security
Executive Director
Research at a glance
Area(s) of Expertise
Research Summary
My research focuses on how business, markets, and value chains are organized, and the effects of regulation and political systems on industry and firm performance. I apply these concepts across a range of industries, from agribusinesses to energy markets and utility regulation.
Michael Sykuta, PhD, is an economist working at the intersections of organizational economics, industrial organization, new institutional economics, public choice, and law. His work ranges from issues in agribusiness and agrifood value chains to energy policy and public utility regulation. He is Executive Director of the Financial Research Institute (FRI), whose programs focus on public utilities regulation and utility industry issues, and Director of the Center for Rural Energy Security (CRES), which focuses on federal and state energy policy and its implications for rural America. Sykuta is an affiliate scholar with the International Center for Law & Economics and co-editor of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN)’s New Institutional Economics eJournal. He teaches in the undergraduate Agribusiness Management program and the Agricultural & Applied Economics graduate programs.
His research focuses on contracting practices, firm organization, organizational governance, and the implications of regulation and government programs for firm and industry behavior. He has published articles in such peer-reviewed journals as Journal of Law and Economics, Financial Review, Journal of Corporate Finance, Antitrust Bulletin, Managerial and Decision Economics, Energy, Utilities Policy, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Review of Agricultural Economics, Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, and Journal of Wine Economics; and book chapters on econometrics of contracting and organizational economics research. He co-edited and published The Elgar Companion to Transaction Cost Economics with Peter G. Klein.
Educational background
- Ph.D., Economics, Washington University, 1994
- M.A., Economics, Washington University, 1990
- B.S., Economics, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 1989
Courses taught
- ABM 3282: Agribusiness Finance
- ABM 4990HW/AAE 7990: Economic Analysis of Policy & Regulation