Professor Albert Ma, Program Director
Miriam Hatoum, Administrative Coordinator

The Industry Studies Program (ISP) in the Department of Economics was founded in 1991, with the goal of encouraging research on industrial organization topics as discussed in its mission statement. ISP has various functions and provides services to the Department.

The Industry Studies Program is devoted to studying the economic organization of industries, firms and markets. The principal goal of the program is to promote and foster high quality academic research on this topic. <the whole statement>

Grants run through ISP
All faculty members are encouraged to run appropriate grants through ISP. Grants run through ISP must be approved by the ISP director and by the Dean's office. The procedures for running a grant through ISP are simple, and an instruction sheet can be obtained from the department Grants Coordinator. If you are doubtful about whether your proposal is appropriate for ISP please check it out with Professor Albert Ma in advance.

Discussion Paper Series
ISP invites faculty working papers on ISP related topics for its discussion paper series. Papers are mailed to over seventy institutions, and authors are given additional copies as well. Abstracts of ISP papers are published in Abstracts of Working Papers in Economics. Ask Miriam Hatoum for details. A list of working papers is available on the bulletin board outside room 545.

Seminars and Conferences
ISP sponsors the weekly microeconomic seminar in both the fall and spring. In the spring semester, ISP also hosts the Health Economics Seminar in conjunction with MIT and Harvard.

Seed Grants
To promote research on IO topics, ISP offers seed grants up to $4000 targeted mostly to junior faculty in the department. In addition, ISP may be able to provide research assistants. The implicit contract for an ISP seed grant is that the recipient will submit an overhead-bearing grant proposal through ISP within a definite period of time (usually one year). In addition, small grants may be provided to graduate students for the purpose of buying data for graduate dissertation research in the field of industrial organization. Please contact Ms. Hatoum for a seed grant application or download the application (pdf).

Visiting Scholars
The visiting scholars program is an important activity of ISP. The policy is to invite prestigious senior scholars whose research is consonant with the purposes of ISP and less senior scholars whose research is directly related to the purposes of ISP. The length of the visit must be at least one week, and the terms are negotiable, although only limited financial support is available. This program is intended to promote intellectual exchange and collaborative research. Faculty may suggest or nominate visitors by writing a brief memo to Albert Ma describing the merits.