Thomas N. Hubbard

About

Thomas N. Hubbard is the Elinor and H. Wendell Hobbs Professor of Management and a Professor of Strategy at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He has been a faculty member at Kellogg since 2005 and served as Senior Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives from 2012 to 2015. Prior to his tenure at Kellogg, he was a professor at the University of Chicago GSB and UCLA, and he also served as a visiting professor at Columbia GSB during 2004-2005. Hubbard's research interests primarily concern how information problems influence the organization of firms and markets, and consequently, the structure of industries. His work has been published in top-ranked journals such as the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Rand Journal of Economics. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His academic background includes a PhD in Economics from Stanford University and a BA with High Honors in Economics from Princeton University.

Research topics

• Microeconomics
• Economics
• Engineering
• Market economy
• Aerospace engineering
• Marketing
• Commerce
• Physics
• Geography
• Natural resource economics

Selected publications

• The Returns to Knowledge Hierarchies

  The Journal of Law Economics and Organization · 2016-06-19 · 31 citations

  articleSenior author

  Hierarchies allow individuals to leverage their knowledge through others’ time. This mechanism increases productivity and amplifies the impact of skill heterogeneity on earnings inequality. This article analyzes the earnings and organization of US lawyers and uses an equilibrium model of knowledge hierarchies inspired by Garicano and Rossi-Hansberg (2006. “Organization and Inequality in a Knowledge Economy,” 121 Quarterly Journal of Economics 1383–436) to assess how much lawyers’ productivity an…

  PublisherDOI

• Learning about the nature of production from equilibrium assignment patterns

  Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization · 2012-08-04 · 26 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Economics of "Radiator Springs:" Industry Dynamics, Sunk Costs, and Spatial Demand Shifts

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2016-05-01 · 11 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  Interstate Highway openings were permanent, anticipated demand shocks that increased gasoline demand and sometimes shifted it spatially. We investigate supply responses to these demand shocks, using county-level observations of service station counts and employment and data on highway openings' timing and locations. When the new highway was close to the old route, average producer size increased, beginning one year before it opened. If instead the interstate substantially displaced traffic, the…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• When Demand Increases Cause Shakeouts

  American Economic Journal Microeconomics · 2019-10-28 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Standard models that guide competition policy imply that demand increases should lead to more, not fewer firms. However, Sutton’s (1991) model shows that demand increases instead can lead to shakeouts if non-price competition takes the form of fixed investments. We investigate this effect in the 1960s–1980s hotel and motel industry, where quality competition arose through investments in swimming pools. We show that demand increases associated with highway openings led to fewer firms, particularl…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Earnings Inequality and Coordination Costs: Evidence from US Law Firms

  The Journal of Law Economics and Organization · 2018-02-21 · 7 citations

  articleSenior author

  Using evidence from confidential Census data on US law offices, we study the extent to decreases in coordination costs are responsible increases in earnings inequality among lawyers. We show that inequality increased substantially between 1977 and 1992, and that partner-associate ratios changed in ways consistent with the hypothesis that coordination costs fell during this period. We then propose a “hierarchical production function” and estimate its parameters in each period. We find that coordi…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Luis Garicano

  New York University

  61 shared

• George P. Baker

  52 shared

• Jeffrey R. Campbell

  University of Notre Dame

  12 shared

• Michael J. Mazzeo

  Hunter College

  7 shared

• R. Andrew Butters

  Indiana University

  3 shared

• Christopher John Ody

  2 shared

• Helen Kellogg

  2 shared

• G. Raghavan

  Defence Institute of Advanced Technology

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Chair's Core Course Teaching Award, 2023-24
• Oliver E. Williamson Award for Best Paper in Law, Economics,…
• Best Professor Award, Kellogg-HKUST EMBA Program

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