FCC Brings On New Chief Economist

WASHINGTON: FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced the appointment of Marius Schwartz to the position of chief economist in the Office of Strategic Planning & Policy Analysis. Schwartz is professor of economics at Georgetown University and will begin June 1, 2011.

FCC Chairman Genachowski said, “I’m delighted that Marius will be joining us. He will bring outstanding economic expertise and a wide range of telecommunications experience. The commission has come to rely heavily on the analyses of the chief economist and his role in building the agency’s economic capabilities, and I look forward to that continuing under Marius.”

Schwartz’s teaching and research specialties are in industrial organization, competition and regulation. Before joining Georgetown University, Schwartz served as economics director of enforcement at the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and as acting deputy assistant attorney general for economics. He also served the President’s Council of Economic Advisers as the senior economist for industrial organization matters. Schwartz holds a B.Sc. degree from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. from UCLA, also in economics.

Outgoing Chief Economist Jonathan Baker, and Gregory Rosston, will both serve as senior economists for transactions to work on the commission’s reviews of the AT&T-T-Mobile and AT&T-Qualcomm transactions.

Baker will return to American University’s Washington College of Law where he is a professor of law. He previously served as the director of the bureau of economics at the Federal Trade Commission. Previously, he worked as a senior economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and as a special assistant to the deputy assistant attorney general for economics in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. He also was an assistant professor at Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, an attorney advisor to the acting chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and an antitrust lawyer in private practice. Baker holds a J.D. from Harvard and a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.

Rosston is deputy director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and deputy director of the Public Policy program at Stanford University. He is also the co-chair of the Department of Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee. He previously served as deputy chief economist at the commission working on the implementation of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and he helped to design and implement the first ever spectrum auctions in the United States. Rosston received his Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University his A.B. with Honors in Economics from University of California at Berkeley.