Richard Sexton 2012–2013 President
Professor, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, UC Davis. 1994-present.
UC Davis Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics chair, 1994–98 and 2011-present.
University of California Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics Director, 2000–03.
Fellow, AAEA, 2004.
Member of the AAAE Board of Directors, 2004–2007.
Co-editor of AJAE, 1998–2000.
Ph.D., agricultural and applied economics, University of Minnesota, 1984.
B.A. in economics and public administration, Saint Cloud State University, 1977.
Richard Sexton was born on a small dairy farm in East Central Minnesota. He graduated from Saint Cloud State University in 1977 with B.A. degrees in economics and public administration. He then did graduate work in agricultural and applied economics at the University of Minnesota, interrupting his studies to teach one year at his undergraduate alma mater, and then to work three years at the Institute for Business and Economic Research at the University of Kansas, where his wife, Terri, was on the faculty in the Economics Department.
Upon completing his Ph.D. in 1984 Sexton began an assistant professor appointment at the University of California, Davis, where he continues to serve as professor of agricultural and resource economics. Sexton served as department chair at UC Davis from 1994-98, and began a second term as chair in 2011. He served also as Director of the University of California Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics from 2000-03. He was a founding editor of the Foundation's outreach publication, Agricultural and Resource Economics Update, and has served continuously as co-editor of that publication, now in its 15th volume.
Sexton's teaching and research program at UC Davis has focused upon issues in applied microeconomics, industrial organization, and agricultural product marketing. He was among the first agricultural economists to apply methods of the “new industrial organization” to agricultural markets, including use of cooperative and non-cooperative game theory to model the behavior of firms and markets, and structural models to test for market power. His work on competition issues evolved to considering the impacts of market power exercised by intermediaries such as food processors and grocery retailers on market behavior and performance, and the distribution of welfare among farmers, consumers, and marketing firms. He played a key role in developing a flexible oligopoly/oligopsony market (aka FOOM) model for use in such analyses.
Sexton was also among the first agricultural economists to study the implications for competition of the spatial dimensions of agricultural markets. Although agricultural economists have long appreciated the importance of space and transportation in agricultural product marketing, most studies were conducted within a perfect-competition framework. However, a market containing spatially dispersed farmers and processing/packing firms and costly transportation is necessarily an imperfectly competitive market because firms are differentiated based upon their location. These rather ubiquitous features of agricultural product markets have key implications for market behavior and performance that had largely been ignored.
Sexton's research has been published in a great many journals, including American Economic Review, American Journal of Agricultural Economics (AJAE), European Economic Review, European Review of Agricultural Economics, Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Journal of Industrial Economics, Land Economics, and RAND Journal of Economics. His research has been recognized with awards from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA), European Economic Association, and Western Association of Agricultural Economics. He is a 2004 Fellow of the AAEA.
Prior to his term as President of AAEA, Sexton served the Association as a co-editor of AJAE from 1998-2000, and as a member of the Board of Directors from 2004-2007. Sexton and his co-editors GianCarlo Moschini, Kathleen Sagerson, and Spiro Stafanou developed the system of four revolving co-editors that has since become a staple of the operations of the AJAE.
Sexton's twin children, Steve and Alison, joined the profession recently by completing their Ph.D.s (Alison in Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota, Steve in Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley) just prior to him assuming the Presidency of AAEA. Rich and Terri now live in the Sierra foothills, where the natural beauty of the environment makes the long commute worthwhile.
