Chad Syverson

What makes a firm, a firm?

Chad Syverson will continue his work on the efficiency of organisations' operations while visiting CESifo. A large body of work in which he has been an active participant has shown that even within narrowly defined markets, there is enormous variation in firms' productivity levels. He is currently working on research into measuring and understanding the extent to which such differences in productivity reflect the misallocation of inputs among firms due to product-market or input-market frictions. Recent evidence has suggested such misallocations could be substantial, but quantifying their size can be heavily dependent on difficult-to-test assumptions. He is also studying the factors that drive companies' vertical integration decisions, with a project that uses detailed shipment data to measure how costly firms view transacting outside their borders. This has important implications for the classic economic question of "What makes a firm, a firm?"

Mr Syverson's research spans several topics, with a particular focus on the interactions of firm structure, market structure and productivity. He has authored or co-authored dozens of scholarly articles and is the co-author (with Austan Goolsbee and Steve Levitt) of the intermediate-level textbook Microeconomics (Worth, 2016). Mr Syverson is an editor of the Rand Journal of Economics, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and has served on multiple National Academies committees.

Chad Syverson is the J. Baum Harris Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He has been on the University of Chicago faculty since 2001. Mr Syverson earned two bachelor's degrees from the University of North Dakota in 1996, one in economics and one in mechanical engineering. After a brief stint working as a mechanical engineer for Unisys Corporation and Loral Defense Systems, he went on to earn a PhD in economics from the University of Maryland in 2001.