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Paul W. MacAvoy, Williams Brothers Professor of Management Studies at Yale School of Management, will speak on “The Strategic Destruction of Northeast Utilities Corporation” 8 p.m. Tuesday, March 5, in the auditorium of Lafayette’s William E. Simon Center for Economics and Business Administration.
Free and open to the public, the talk is the final event in the John M. Olin Lecture Series in Political Economy, which has featured more than 20 lectures given by prominent speakers at Lafayette.
MacAvoy was a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and co-chairman of the President’s Task Force on Regulatory Reform in the Ford Administration, and a member of the Presidential Task Force on Revision of Antitrust Laws in the Johnson Administration. Yale University awarded MacAvoy the Wilbur Cross Medal in 1982 and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976.
MacAvoy has held his current position since 1992, following posts at Dartmouth College, Yale School of Organization, University of Rochester, Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and University of Chicago.
Many corporations have appointed MacAvoy to their boards of directors, including Chase Manhattan Bank and Chase Manhattan Corporation, American Cyanamid Company, AMAX Gold, United States Synthetic Fuels Corp., Open Environment Corp., and Colt Industries.
MacAvoy served as a member of the Bates College Board of Trustees from 1977-82 and 1997-98. He has been an academic adviser to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research since 1992, and from 1991-1992 served as a panel member on the National Academy of Sciences’ committee on Government’s Role in Civilian Technology. He has served on numerous other committees and commissions, including the American Bar Association Commission on Law and the Economy, the President’s National Productivity Advisory Committee, and the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States. He was a staff economist on the Council of Economic Advisers from 1965-1966 in the Johnson Administration.
MacAvoy is the author or co-author of 19 books, including Deregulation of Entry in Long-Distance Telecommunications (Michigan University Press, 2001) and The Natural Gas Market: Sixty Years of Regulation and Deregulation (Yale University Press, 2000), as well as over 30 articles. He also has given expert testimony and served as a consultant on many legal and corporate issues.
MacAvoy received a bachelor’s degree from Bates College in 1955, and a master’s degree in 1956 and Ph.D. in 1960 from Yale University.
The John M. Olin Foundation was established in 1953 by John Merrill Olin (1892-1982), an inventor, industrialist, conservationist, and philanthropist. Olin intended the foundation to close its doors by the time those trustees who best knew his philanthropic ideals had retired. Following the death in 2000 of William E. Simon, Lafayette Class of 1952, whom Olin had chosen in 1977 to be president of the foundation, the organization’s trustees began to implement a plan to phase out the foundation over the next few years.