Robert H. Frank
New York Times columnist
Professor of Management and of Economics, Cornell University
consumer behavior affect economics.
Highlights
An internationally renowned behavioral economist, Robert H. Frank studies the ways in which social and psychological forces affect market behavior and the ways markets and economics affect human behavior. He is an expert on the causes and consequences of social inequality, and the ways that public policy can enhance market efficiency and improve the well-being of middle-income families.
He is the author of the new book The Economic Naturalist's Field Guide: Comon Sense Principles for Troubled Times, a brilliant behavioral economics perspective on the most important issues of our time, from regulation to taxes to healthcare.Professor Frank is the author of several other well received books, including an economics textbook co-written with Ben Bernanke, and two books that have received glowing reviews in The New York Times Book Review. His books have been translated into eleven languages.
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In Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class, he explores the very meaning of happiness and prosperity in America today. He examines how changes in the distributions of income and wealth have affected consumer spending patterns and suggests policy reforms to mitigate the harm caused to middle-income families by rising inequality.
The Economic Naturalist answers scores of intriguing questions from everyday life using basic economic principles in an engaging and accessible style.
Robert H. Frank is H. J. Louis Professor of Management and Professor of Economics at the Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University. In addition, he is the Peter and Charlotte Schoenfeld Faculty Fellow at NYU's Stern School of Business during the 2008-2009 academic year.
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Professor Frank is a regular contributor to the Economic View column in The New York Times.
He has been the Goldwin Smith Professor of Economics, Ethics and Public Polity in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences and the Professor of American Civilization at l’Ecole des Hautes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has served as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Nepal, chief economist for the Civil Aeronautics Board and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
The Economic Naturalist's Field Guide
Common Sense Principles for Troubled Times
How context shapes individual economic decisions and how knowledge of human behavior should shape economic policy decisions.
How do people actually behave when confronted with economic choices? (And almost every choice we make is economic.) While our desires are boundless, our resources are limited and trade-offs confront us at every turn. Arguing that self-interest alone cannot explain the choices we make, Robert Frank, a leading proponent of the emerging field of behavioral economics, suggests that context shapes every decision and that consistent human foibles matter—no matter how much economists wish to ignore them.
With all of the wit, style, and insight of his earlier book The Economic Naturalist, Frank turns his eye to large-scale policy decisions about regulation, tax policy, and health care, and to our personal decisions about paying for food and gasoline and even to how we chose to love.
In our current anxious economic climate, The Economic Naturalist's Guide has fascinating and revealing insights with more bearing on our pocketbooks, policies, and personal happiness than ever.
Falling Behind
How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class
In his most recent exploration of how the earning and consuming patterns of the very rich affect society at large, Professor Frank argues that extreme consumption raises the bar—and the costs of achieving many basic goals—for everyone, even middle-income workers and consumers who can only dream of yachts and mansions.
Here’s how it works: Large increases in income and wealth have promoted top earners to buy bigger and better, which has shifted the frame of reference that defines what those just below the top deem necessary or desirable. So that group spends more, too, and its spending similarly influences the group just below. And so on all the way down. The problem for middle-income families is that house prices and school quality are closely linked. So even though these families don’t earn much more than they did several decades ago, they must buy bigger more expensive houses than before, or else send their children to below-average schools. To pay for these houses, they spend more than they earn and carry record levels of debt. In short, increased wealth and spending at the top of the economic pyramid sets off "expenditure cascades" that raise the cost of achieving many basic goals for the middle class.
The changes in spending patterns prompted by recent changes in the distributions of income and wealth have imposed not only important psychological costs on middle-income families but also a variety of more tangible economic costs.
[Falling Behind] will change how you think about them."
~ Paul Romer, Stanford University
In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas
This fascinating and playful book explains the economic forces behind mysteries of everyday life that range from the comical to the profound. The Economic Naturalist explains basic economic principles and teaches you how to think like an economist. The online video of Professor Frank's lecture about The Economic Naturalist at Google's Mountain View headquarters has consistently been one of the top-rated entries in the company's prestigious Authors@Google series.
Choosing the Right Pond
Human Behavior and the Quest for Status
Is it better to be a big frog in a small pond or a small frog in a big pond? In Choosing the Right Pond, Professor Frank argues that concerns about status permeate and profoundly alter a broad range of human behavior.
Economists have too often neglected this fundamental element of human nature and therefore have failed to ask many obviously important questions and have offered wrong or at best misleading answers to the questions they do ask. Choosing the Right Pond offers a radical reinterpretation, based on scientific evidence about human nature, of what private markets can and cannot do and suggests new ways of looking at familiar regulations and social programs. Many of the issues discussed touch directly upon the strongest concerns we feel as human beings struggling to define our roles and affirm our importance in the world around us.
Principles of Economics
with Ben Bernanke
This textbook pioneered a new way to teach economics that focuses on core principles intuitively illustrated with problems and examples drawn from familiar contexts, encouraging students to become "Economic Naturalists," people who use economic principles to understand the world around them.
Credentials
- H. J. Louis Professor of Management and Professor of Economics, Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University
- "Economic View" columnist, The New York Times
- Past president of the Eastern Economic Association
- Former Goldwin Smith Professor of Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy, Cornell University
- Former French-American Foundation Professor of American Civilization, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris
- Former Chief Economist, Civil Aeronautics Board
- Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California
- High school mathematics and science teacher, Peace Corps, Nepal
Awards
- Apple Award for Best Teacher, Johnson School of Management, 2005
- Russell Award for Distinguished Teaching, Johnson School of Management, 2004
- 2003 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought
- Critic’s Choice Award (San Francisco Review of Books), New York Times Notable Book, BusinessWeek Ten Best List for 1995, Top Ten Books (China Times), Best Books of the Year List (The London Observer)—The Winner-Take-All Society
- Knight Ridder's list of best books of 1999—Luxury Fever
- Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship
- Kenan Enterprise Award
- Outstanding Educator Citation, Merrill Scholars Program
Books
The Economic Naturalist's Field Guide: Common Sense Principles for Troubled Times
Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class
The Economic Naturalist
What Price the Moral High Ground?
Principles of Economics (with Ben Bernanke)
Luxury Fever: Money and Happiness in an Era of Excess
The Winner-Take-All Society (with Philip Cook)
Microeconomics and Behavior
Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions
Choosing the Right Pond: Human Behavior and the Quest for Status
The Distributional Consequences of Direct Foreign Investment