Born
April 4, 1934, Florence, South Carolina, USA Current Position
W.W. Cooper University Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, 1981-.
Past Positions
Dean and Professor of Political Economy, School of Urban and Public Affairs (now the Heinz School of Public Policy and Management), Carnegie Mellon University, 1975-1981; Associate Dean and Professor of Political Economy, School of Urban and Public Affairs, 1968-1975; Professor of Economics, Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Mellon University, 1967-1968; Associate Professor of Economics, Graduate School of Industrial Administration, 1965-1967; Assistant Professor of Economics, Graduate School of Industrial Administration, 1960-1965.
Degrees
A.B., Wofford College, 1956; M.A., Ph.D., University of Virginia, 1957, 1960.
Offices and Honors
President, The Public Choice Society, 1970-1972. Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 1974-1975.
Fellow of the Econometric Society, elected 1978. Research Director, Pennsylvania Tax Commission, 1979-81.
President, The Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management, 1983.
Listed in Who’s Who in Economics: A Biographical Dictionary of Major Economists 1700-1980.
Principal Fields of Interest
Public Choice; Issues of Public Policy, including regulation, education, and urban problems; and a special interest in freedom, both economic and political, and its consequences for the organization of society.
Selected Publications
Articles
1. "The economics of urban renewal." Law and Contemporary Problems, 26(winter):1961 (with A. Whinston).
2. "Externalities, welfare and the theory of games."Journal of Political Economy, 70(June):1962 (with A. Whinston).
3. "Welfare economics and the theory of second best." Review of Economic Studies, 32(January):1965 (with A. Whinston).
4. "An elementary political and economic theory of the expenditures of local governments." Southern Economic Journal, 32(October):1966 (with J. Barr).
5. "On the process of budgeting: an empirical study of congressional appropriations." Papers on Non-Market Decision Making, 1:1966 (with M.A.H. Dempster and A. Wildavsky).
6. "A mathematical model of policy formation in a democratic society." In Mathematical Applications in Political Science II (Southern Methodist University Press, 1966) (J. Bernd, ed.) (with M.J. Hinich).
7. "A theory of the budgetary process." American Political Science Review, 60(September):1966 (with M.A.H. Dempster and A. Wildavsky).
8. "Urban property markets: some empirical results and their implications for municipal zoning." Journal of Law and Economics, 10(October):1967 (with J.P. Crecine and J.E. Jackson).
9. "Externalities, information and alternative collective action," (with M. Kamien), The Analysis and Evaluation off Public Expenditures: the PPB System, A compendium of papers submitted to the Subcommittee on Economy in Government of the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress of the U.S. (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969.)
10. "An expository development of a mathematical model of the electoral process." American Political Science Review, 54(June):1970 (with M.J. Hinich and P.C. Ordeshook).
11. "Social preference orderings and majority rule." Econometrica, 40(January):1972 (with M.H. DeGroot and M.J. Hinich).
12. "The shrinkage in the stock of low quality housing in the central city: an empirical study of the U.S. experience over the last ten years." Urban Studies, 11 (February): 1974 (With C. Eastman and Chang-i Hua).
13. "Senate defeat of the family assistance plan." Public Policy, 3(summer):1974 (with J.E. Jackson).
14. "Towards a predictive theory of government expenditure: U.S. domestic appropriations." British Journal of Politics, 1975 (with M.A.H. Dempster and A. Wildavsky).
15. "Imperfect consumers and welfare comparisons of policies concerning information and regulation." The Bell Journal of Economics, 7(Autumn): 1976 (with C.S. Colantoni and M. Swaminathan).
16. "A simultaneous equations model of the educational process." Journal of Public Economics, 1977 (with A.E. Boardman and P.R. Sanday).
17. "The jitneys: a study of grassroots capitalism." Journal of Contemporary Studies, 7(Winter):1984 (with N. Johnson).
18. "Private income security during a time of stress: a case study of U.S. Steel." Labour and Society, 15:1990 (with E. Montgomery).
19. "The two freedoms, economic growth and development: an empirical study." Public Choice, 100:1999 (with W. Wu).
20. "The two freedoms in a growth model." The Journal of Private Enterprise, XIV(Spring):1999 (with W. Wu).
Principal Contributions
Otto Davis’s interest in the problems associated with public choice began in graduate school under the influence of James M. Buchanan, his advisor, and has been a constant theme in his intellectual life. Also, he has been consistently interested in public policy problems including the intellectual underpinnings, that make analysis of such problems possible. Otherwise, he refers to himself as an intellectual drifter, working on whatever strikes his fancy at one particular time. Recently, the quantification and measurement of the philosophy of classical liberalism, and democracy, have stimulated his latent interest in the study of these freedoms and he expects this interest to occupy much of his time in the future.
