Alan L. Olmstead is Director of the Institute of Governmental Affairs and Professor of Economics and at the University of California at Davis. He received his B.A. from San Jose State College in 1964 and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1970.  He has been on the faculty at UC Davis since 1969.

Professor Olmstead’s research has focused on the evolution of United States financial markets, the effects of technological and institutional changes on productivity growth, and how incentive structures affect individual and firm behavior in the marketplace.  Much of his work has investigated the causes and consequences of the mechanization of American agriculture. This research has added to the understanding of the diffusion many of the machines that transformed rural America.  Other work has focused on understanding the role of international markets in the development of California agriculture and on the international transfer of agricultural technologies.  More recent work has examined the role of biological innovations on agricultural productivity growth in the United States and elsewhere.  This is the subject of a forthcoming book with Cambridge University Press.  In addition Professor Olmstead is one of six Editors In Chief of the five volume Historical Statistics of the United States: Millennial Edition, published in 2006.

Professor Olmstead’s articles have appeared in The American Economic Review, Science, The Journal of Political Economy, The Journal of Economic History, The American Journal of Agricultural Economics, The Journal of Human Resources, Agricultural History, and other scholarly publications.

At the Institute of Governmental Affairs, Professor Olmstead oversees seven research centers and programs and manages several public affairs and outreach initiatives.  Prior to assuming the Directorship of the IGA in 1984, he served as the Director of the campus’s Agricultural History Center.  In addition, he has directed the All-University of California Group in Economic History since its inception as a continuous organization in 1979.  In this capacity he coordinates activities in economic history on the University’s eight general campuses, managing two conferences a year and a variety of student and faculty exchange programs. From 1985 to 1991 he was co-head of the United States side of the US-Soviet Exchange in Quantitative Agricultural History, and from 1989 to 1991 he advised elected officials on redrafting the constitution of the USSR on issues of privatization and land reform.  Subsequently, he advised on economic reform in the Czech Republic, China, and Mongolia.  He has lectured and taught courses in over twenty countries.  From 1993 to 1999 he advised the California State Public Utilities Commission, heading a review investigating the effect of incentive structures on worker and firm performance.

Professor Olmstead is currently the president of the Economic History Association. He is a past National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow and has held visiting scholar appointments at institutes in Spain, France, and Italy. He has twice received the Vernon Carstensen Award presented for the best article of the year in Agricultural History.  In 1999 he received the inaugural Alan Lloyd Fellowship presented by the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society.   In 2002 he received the Wayne D. Rasmussen Prize for research in agricultural history, and in 2003 he received the Arthur H. Cole Prize for the best article published in the Journal of Economic History.