Professor of Economics
Office: Wyman 520
Phone: (410) 516-7613
Fax: (410) 516-7600
E-mail: bruce.hamilton@jhu.edu
Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
Special Office Hours for the beginning of fall semester:
Friday August 28 7-12 am and 1-3:30 pm
Monday August 31 7-10 am and 2-3:30 pm
Tue, Wed 7-10 am
Dear students in the class of elements of microeconomics
Please read this file [PDF] to find out how your grade was determined, and other related information.
Bruce Hamilton came to Johns Hopkins as an Assistant Professor in 1973, one year after obtaining his Ph.D. from Princeton University. Since that time he has spent his entire career at Hopkins, with the exception of a one-semester Sabbatical leave at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He was made Professor of Economics in July 1983, and served as Acting Chair during spring term, 1983-84. He then served as Department Chair from July, 1985 through June, 1992.
Dr. Hamilton is an applied microeconomist. Until approximately 1985, virtually all of his research was in the broad field of urban economics, with specialties in urban public finance and urban transportation. His work during the 1970s on the Tiebout Hypothesis led to a resurgence in professional interest in the workings of local public economies.
Subsequently, Dr. Hamilton's research has been more eclectic. He has recently published a paper on the economics of professional sports stadia, with emphasis on the new stadia in Baltimore. He has a working paper on the causes of the recent (two-decade) dramatic rise in automobile longevity. This work shows that essentially all of the longevity improvement is unrelated to any improvements in the inherent durability of cars themselves.
More recently he has used a food-demand function and the PSID data set to estimate the annual bias in the Consumer Price Index, separately for whites and blacks. As this method has very limited data requirements, he is currently determining whether the technique might fruitfully be applied to the measurement of inflation in other countries, including developing countries whose data are poor.
Dr. Hamilton teaches the Elements of Microeconomics course in the undergraduate curriculum, as well as an upper-level seminar on the Economics of Antitrust (jointly taught with antitrust attorney Robert Levy).
Hamilton, Bruce W., "Class action in price-fixing litigation when the fixed price is a wage rate: /Law et al. v. NCAA/," The Antitrust Bulletin, Summer 2003, 505-529
Hamilton, Bruce W., "Black-White Differences in Inflation: 1974-1991," Journal of Urban Economics, November, 2001, 77-96.
Hamilton, Bruce W., "Using Engel's Law to Estimate CPI Bias," American Economic Review, June, 2001, pp. 619-630.