FTC Chairman Appoints Michael Salinger Director of the Bureau of Economics

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras has named Michael Salinger to be Director of the agency’s Bureau of Economics. Current Director Luke Froeb, who has served at the FTC for the past two years, will be returning to the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University in early July. The Director supervises economic analysis at the Commission and advises the Commission on economic policy matters.

“I am grateful to Luke for his outstanding work at the FTC, his passionate advocacy on behalf of free markets, and his commitment to research and fact-based decision-making,” said Chairman Majoras. “I am confident that Michael’s insight and experience will continue this tradition of excellence and provide invaluable assistance to the Commission in fulfilling its joint competition and consumer protection mission.”

Salinger is a Professor of Economics at the Boston University School of Management, where he has served as Chairman of the Department of Finance and Economics. Prior to joining Boston University in 1990, he was an associate professor at Columbia University Business School. From 1985 to 1986, he was a staff economist in the Bureau of Economics. Salinger has published extensively in areas of interest to the Commission’s mission, including the competitive effects of tying and of vertical mergers, the structural determinants of market power, and the statistical properties of firm growth. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Industrial Economics and the Review of Industrial Organization. He has been a consultant for the FTC, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and private clients. Salinger has a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an undergraduate degree from Yale University.

While at the FTC, Froeb’s primary accomplishments include clarifying the role of economic structural models – such as merger simulation, auction models, and bargaining models – in antitrust cases and continuing the dialogue with European competition authorities regarding economic analysis in the antitrust arena. Throughout his tenure, he has stressed the importance of grounding economic models in solid empirical evidence. Froeb serves as the William C. and Margaret W. Oehmig Associate Professor in Entrepreneurship and Free Enterprise at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management. Prior to joining the FTC, he served as an economist in the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, taught economics at Tulane University, and was the Kramer Foundation Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. In addition, Froeb has spoken around the world on competition issues and has published on a wide variety of topics, including antitrust, mergers, law and economics, patent damages, and econometrics in the Antitrust Law Journal and other prominent publications. He has created or collaborated on several economic software products and has been honored with multiple grants and awards. Froeb earned a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Wisconsin and holds an undergraduate degree from Stanford University.

The FTC’s Bureau of Economics assists the Commission in evaluating the economic impact of its antitrust and consumer protection actions. The Bureau’s analytical work covers several categories: providing economic advice for enforcement actions, working closely with the Bureaus of Competition and Consumer Protection; studying the effects of legislative options and regulations as part of the advocacy program coordinated by the Office of Policy Planning; and analyzing market issues to create economic reports and recommendations on various markets and industries.