Biography

Bryan Ellickson (1941 – 2024)

Bryan came to UCLA in 1968. He had studied physics as an undergraduate at the University of Oregon, where his father was a physics professor. His PhD in Economics was from MIT, where he met his wife Phyllis who got her degree in Political Science. His son Paul continued the family tradition, getting a PhD in economics at MIT and becoming a professor at the University of Rochester Business School. With the onset of Parkinson’s disease, Bryan retired in 2009.

Identification of research with publication and its compartmentalization from teaching did not apply to Bryan. His love of learning did not recognize those divisions.

His first interests were in urban economics, economic geography and local public goods. A sampling of his early publications in prominent journals included: “Jurisdictional Fragmentation and Residential Choice” (1971), “A Generalization of the Pure Theory of Public Goods” (1973), “Competitive Equilibrium with Local Public Goods” (1979), “Hedonic Theory and the Demand for Cable Television” (1979), and “An Alternative Test of the Hedonic Theory of Housing Markets” (1981).

Becoming convinced that advanced mathematics was an important foundation for economic reasoning, Bryan undertook a course of self-study. A published version of this pursuit was the graduate level text “Competitive Equilibrium: Theory and Applications” (1993) synthesizing the economics-mathematics of recent advances in general equilibrium theory.

With joint authors, his interests led to extensions of earlier work such as “Clubs and the Market” (1999) (with Birgit Grodal, Suzanne Scotchmer, William Zame) and “A Competitive Model of Economic Geography” (2005) (with William Zame)

Bryan’s study of mathematics also sparked an interest in finance. Here, the gap between research and publication versus teaching widened. He created a successful undergraduate and graduate specialization in finance in the Economics Department, attracting some of the best students from Economics and Mathematics. One of his research goals was to show how recent news was incorporated into movements in daily stock market prices, for which he assembled a time-series database of intraday trading. “Estimating Stochastic Volatility within a Trading Day,” “Modeling Volatility Using High-Frequency Data” and “Essays on High-Frequency Finance” were the titles of 3 of the 13 doctoral dissertations in finance that Bryan supervised — 8 of the 13 came after he retired. The trade-off between interacting with graduate students and writing on his own resulted in an unfinished manuscript entitled “Financial Markets.” His publications in finance were with a former student, “Intertemporal Insurance” [1997] (with Jose Penalva-Zuasti) and “Dynamic Asset Pricing in a System of Local Housing Markets.” (2010) (with Patrick Bayer and Paul Ellickson).

In his last research project, Bryan was pursuing connections between physics and economics. Drawing on his earlier background, he continued his education reading advanced texts in physics. The goal was to call attention to energy, in place of the traditional focus on capital and labor, as a key factor of economic growth. With his lack of student contact and failing health, this will have to be a research agenda for others to explore.

Bryan supervised 34 doctoral dissertations, devoting considerable time and involvement to each. His commitment to teaching extended well beyond his immediate research interests. He was a recipient of the UCLA Undergraduate Teaching Award (1983), the Western Economics Association Teaching Award and the winner of numerous Department Scoville Awards for highest teaching evaluations of large undergraduate Economics classes.

Throughout his career, Bryan was unstinting in his willingness to serve and to do so effectively. Within the department, he served nine years as Undergraduate Vice Chair, and provided three years of leadership as Department Chair.

Bryan was equally committed to service to the University. As someone who had built his own computer, he was an early advocate supporting the growth of UCLA’s Social Science Computing, twice chairing the Academic Senate Computing Committee. He was the author of a 48-page report on the state of campus computing that had an important impact on centralized computing at UCLA. During his time at UCLA he served on 22 different named University committees, spending a cumulative 52 years on committee service.

Bryan was a beloved mentor by his students and a supportive colleague of his fellow faculty.

Education

Ph.D. M.I.T.