Two Think Minimum

Joel Waldfogel is Associate Dean of MBA programs at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. He 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. Prior to Wharton, he was an associate professor of economics at Yale University.

Jennifer Fauver joins Two Think Minimum to discuss her new research paper entitled, “Putting a Number on the Debate: An Empirical Assessment of the U.S. Federal Antitrust Enforcement by State Attorneys General.” The article focuses on the enduring debate regarding the appropriate role for State AGs in federal antitrust enforcement. She adds to the empirical legal studies literature with a novel dataset of antitrust enforcement by state attorneys general from the last twenty years. She provides a cost-benefit analysis of State AG enforcement institutions. Jenn has more than 20 years of experience in law and economics, having worked for NERA Economic Consulting in antitrust litigation. She is a recent graduate of George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School and headed off to private practice at Wilson Sonsini this fall.

Today, we are delighted to have as our guest, Evan Kwerel, who is Senior Economic Advisor at the Federal Communications Commission. The impact of Evan's career at the FCC was recognized last year, when he was awarded the 2021 Paul Volcker Career Achievement Award for pioneering the use of spectrum auctions. To get an idea of what Evan has accomplished and to introduce the discussion, let me read the first couple of paragraphs from the citation. “During more than three decades as a Federal Communications Commission economist, Evan Kwerel has been a key driver of America’s wireless revolution, establishing the first-ever competitive auctions to allocate public airwaves for the transmission of sound, data, and video across the country while raising billions of dollars for the government. The market-based FCC auctions of electromagnetic spectrum, the radio frequencies that carry voices between cell phones, television shows from broadcasters and online information from one computer to the next, were conceived and implemented by Kwerel based on many of the theories of 2020 Nobel Prize-winning economists Paul Milgrom and Bob Wilson. Since the early 1990s, a total of 107 FCC spectrum auctions have generated more than $200 billion in revenue for the government. After winning the Nobel Prize, Milgrom wrote that ‘Evan’s individual contributions were so major that it would have been appropriate for him to share this prize.’”

Stan is a Senior Consultant with Charles River Associates. He's a nationally recognized expert in the economics of intellectual property rights, telecommunications policy, and telecommunications and computer standards. Stan has taught at Rice, Columbia, and the Georgetown University Law Center. And in government, he was a Brookings Economic Policy Fellow for the Office of Telecommunications Policy and the Executive Office of the President and Co-Director of the Network Inquiry Special Staff at the Federal Communications Commission. Prior to joining CRA, he was a Senior Economist at the Rand Corporation. Phil is a Senior Research Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. Phil has practiced communications and antitrust law in the government and private law firms for nearly five decades. In the Obama administration, he served as Senior Counselor to the FCC chairman. And before that, as Ambassador and US Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy. Earlier in his career, he was an antitrust prosecutor at the DOJ, where he was lead counsel for the US v. AT&T case, and also at the FTC, and he has been chief of three FCC bureaus.

As states ramp up their efforts to distribute broadband funding, policymakers will need data to help them identify the areas of their state that are in dire need of investment. On the latest edition of Two Think Minimum, Scott Wallsten, Sarah Oh, and Nathaniel Lovin discussed TPI’s broadband mapping initiative, which aims to put existing metrics into context and provide decision-makers with actionable intelligence. By harnessing the power of cloud computing, TPI’s broadband map allows users to seamlessly combine datasets and arrive at insights that would have been impossible to glean from a single source.

Adam Kovacevich is the founder and CEO of the Chamber of Progress, a new, center-left tech industry policy coalition promoting technology's progressive future. The organization works to ensure that all Americans benefit from technological leaps and that the tech industry operates responsibly and fairly. Adam is a veteran Democratic tech industry leader who has had a front-row seat for more than 20 years in the tech industry's political maturation.

Jonathan Make is the former Executive Editor at Warren Communications, which includes Comms Daily, where he's also a journalist. He joined the Warren Communications staff in 2005 after covering the industry at Bloomberg, and after moving to Washington in 2003 to research the FCC as part of a master's degree in Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. In his next role, Jonathan will be joining the Cheyenne Wyoming Daily Metropolitan Newspaper as an editor.

John List is the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on questions in microeconomics, with a particular emphasis on using field experiments to address both positive and normative issues. For decades his field experimental research has focused on issues related to the inner-workings of markets, the effects of various incentives schemes on market equilibria and allocations, how behavioral economics can augment the standard economic model, on early childhood education and interventions, and most recently on the gender earnings gap in the gig economy (using evidence from rideshare drivers).

Bruce Mehlman is the founding partner of Mehlman, Castagnetti, Rosen & Thomas, one of Washington's premier lobbying and government relations firms. Bruce has over two decades of experience in public policy, business, and the law, helping leaders in organizations understand, anticipate, and navigate political risk. He is a highly sought-after speaker on policy and political trends. His slide decks analyzing major issues and trends are consistently picked up by national news media and eagerly consumed by tens of thousands of readers around the world, including us. Among his many previous positions, he was Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Technology Policy in the George Bush administration.

Blair Levin is the Policy Advisor to New Street Research and a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Project at the Brookings Institution. He also served as Chief of Staff to FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, directed the writing of the United States National Broadband Plan, where I worked for him, and was a Policy Analyst for the Equity Research Teams at Legg Mason and Stifel Nicolaus, in addition to many other activities. Gregory Rosston is the Gordon Cain Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and Director of the Stanford Public Policy Program. He served as Deputy Chief Economist at the Federal Communications Commission, working on the implementation of the Telecommunications Act in 1996, and he helped design and implement the first-ever spectrum auction in the United States.