Jeffrey Church is a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Calgary. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley and a B.A. (Honours) in Economics from the University of Calgary. Church was the 1995-1996 T.D. MacDonald Chair in Industrial Economics at the Canadian Competition Bureau. He was a Co-Editor of the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy (2001-2007) and on the Editorial Board, of the Canadian Journal of Economics (1993-1996). Church was the founding Academic Director of the Centre for Regulatory Affairs in the Van Horne Institute for International Transportation and Regulatory Affairs (1998-2001) and an IAPR Professor, Institute for Advanced Policy Research, at the University of Calgary (2006 to 2009) where he coordinated the Markets, Institutions, and Regulation Working Group.
Church’s published research includes articles on merger simulation, network economics, strategic competition, entry deterrence, intellectual property rights, and competition policy. He is the coauthor of a book on the regulation of natural gas pipelines in Canada, a text in industrial organization, and a monograph for the European Commission on the competitive impacts of vertical and conglomerate mergers. He has acted as an expert on regulatory and competition policy matters.
His research interests are in the field of industrial organization, with an emphasis on network externalities, competition policy, and regulatory economics. Neil Gandal (Tel Aviv University) and him have a long-standing research programme investigating network externalities in systems composed of a hardware good that requires complementary software—the production of which is characterized by long-run fixed costs and for which consumers have a taste for variety. Recent work in this area considers the relationship between indirect network effects and network externalities and the pricing and introduction of competitive software upgrades. Recent research projects in competition policy have focused on the economics and enforcement policy of conglomerate and vertical mergers. Recent research projects in regulatory economics include optimal tolling on multicommodity oil pipelines, the economics of transmission pricing in Alberta’s electricity sector, and the affect of intertemporal substitution by producers of non-renewable resources on the monopsony power of a pipeline.