Benjamin Zycher is the President of Benjamin Zycher Economics Associates and is a senior fellow in economics at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. In addition, he is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute in Washington, a member of the advisory board of the quarterly journal Regulation, and a member of the Advisory Council of Consumer Alert. He is a former senior economist at the RAND Corporation, a former member of the Board of Directors of the Western Economic Association International, a former adjunct professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, a former vice president for research at the Milken Institute, the former editor of the quarterly public policy magazine Jobs & Capital, and a former senior staff economist at the Presidents Council of Economic Advisers during the first two years of the Reagan Administration. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California Los Angeles (1979) and a Master of Public Policy from the University of California Berkeley (1974).
He has done considerable work on the economic and political effects of regulation, on the effects of government spending, taxation, and debt, on benefit/cost analysis of counterterrorism public expenditures, and on the effects of economic institutions and performance upon economic growth and resource use. He has done a substantial amount of work as well on energy and environmental policy, and on such varying topics in international economics as resource dependence and the risk of "shocks," long-term trends in economic performance and military capability, the use of trade policy in pursuit of foreign policy goals, and measures of burdensharing within alliances. His other work is on voter information and voting behavior, and on choices among constitutional institutions. Among his publications are "Defense Economics" and "OPEC" in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (forthcoming).
He is a naturalized citizen of the United States (1956), 55 years of age, married with two children, and lives in Agoura Hills, California.