William Brock, Distinguished Fellow 2004

William Brock has been a prolific contributor to research on economic dynamics. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969, where he wrote his dissertation under the guidance of David Gale. He has served on the faculties of the University of Rochester, the University of Chicago, Cornell University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation and early work were on optimal growth theory. His proof of the existence of a growth program that is maximal with respect to the catching-up criterion was an especially notable contribution. Other important contributions were his proofs of the turnpike theorem, and of the existence of a stationary program for a single sector stochastic growth model, with Leonard J. Mirman. This work was followed by a large number of significant papers on the stability of stochastic growth paths and of optimal control systems.

In the late 1970s, Brock undertook a new project in political economy. Together with Stephen Magee and other collaborators, he modeled the determination of tariffs in a democratic country as the outcome of a dynamic game among politicians, interest group lobbyists, and the electorate. This work is summarized in Black Hole Tariffs and Endogenous Policy Theory: Political Economy in General Equilibrium, written with Stephen Magee and Leslie Young.

In the 1980s, Brock developed an interest in chaotic deterministic systems and their application to economics and finance. He made major contributions to the development of statistical tests for the presence of a chaotic deterministic process generating a time series. This work is summarized in Nonlinear Dynamics, Chaos, and Instability: Statistical Theory and Economic Evidence, written with David A. Hsieh and Blake LeBaron.

From the late 1990s until recently, he has applied optimal control theory to environmental management issues. His paper, "Management of Eutrophication for Lakes Subject to Potentially Irreversible Change," written with Stephen Carpenter and Donald Ludwig, was an important early contribution.

William Brock's contributions to intertemporal economics and nonlinear dynamics have been clever, deep, and varied, and reflect a driving interest in economic policy and in the interaction of the political and economic processes that form it.