Price Fishback
Price Fishback is Thomas R. Brown Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona and Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also a Program Scholar for the Hoover Program on Regulation and the Rule of Law, a Fellow of the TIAA-CREF Institute, and a Research Affiliate of the Centre for Economic History at Australian National University.
Prior to holding the Brown Professorship, Fishback was the Frank and Clara Kramer Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona. His first position out of graduate school was at the University of Georgia. He arrived there in 1982, and remained until moving to Arizona in 1993. He has held visiting positions at the University of Texas, Oxford University, and the NBER.
Fishback holds a B.A. in mathematics and economics from Butler University (1977), and earned his Masters (1979) and Ph.D. (1983) from the University of Washington. He wrote his dissertation under the direction of Robert Higgs. His classmates included EHA Fellows Lee Alston and John Wallis.
Fishback served as co-editor of the Journal of Economic History, and has served on numerous editorial boards. He has served as a trustee for the Cliometric Society and the Economic History Association, and President of the Economic History Association. He also served as Executive Director of the EHA. He is the editor of the Markets and Governments in American History book series published by the University of Chicago Press, and was a principal investigator for the NSF Grant for the annual Clio conference from 1999-2008, and was on the conference organizing committee for the annual Cliometric Society conferences from 1996-2008.
He won the Paul Samuelson Award for outstanding scholarly writing on lifelong financial security in 2000 for his book, A Prelude to the Welfare State: The Origins of Workers Compensation, coauthored with Shawn Kantor. The book also received the Richard A. Lester Prize for the outstanding book in labor economics and industrial relations, awarded by the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University. He has twice been awarded the Cole Prize for best article published in the Journal of Economic History. In 1998 he was named the Kentucky Distinguished Economist. In 2010 he was the co-winner of the IPUMS-US/IPUMS-CPS Research Award for his article “The Effect of Internal Migration on Local Labor Markets: American Cities During the Great Depression,” published in the Journal of Labor Economics and coauthored with Leah Platt Boustan and Shawn Kantor.
He has also been recognized as an outstanding teacher, winning multiple awards for his teaching in the University of Arizona MBA Program. He won the Swift Teaching Award at the University of Georgia, and received the university’s Honors Day Recognition for Outstanding Teaching on three occasions. In 2015 he received the Jonathan Hughes Award for Excellence in Teaching from the EHA.
Fishback has authored two books and edited two others and published 44 journal articles and 18 book chapters. He has two books currently in progress.
He has received numerous grants from the NSF, National Endowment for the Humanities, Earhart Foundation, Bradley Foundation, Economic History Assocition, and the Universities of Arizona and Georgia for his research. In addition, he has received grants for organizing conferences from the NSF, NBER, Bradley Foundation, Earhart Foundation and the University of Arizona.
He has been the sponsor of NSF dissertation grants for nine of his advisees. He has been an invited seminar speaker at more than 80 different univeristies around the world. He has mentored more than two dozen graduate student dissertations and has served on the committees of more than fifty more students.