Faculty Director
Frederick C. Joerg Professor of Business Administration and Professor of Economics, Law and Management
After a year as Research Fellow in Industrial Organization at the Harvard Business School and twenty years teaching in Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Wesley Cohen (Ph.D., Economics, Yale University, 1981) joined the faculty of the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University as Professor of Economics and Management in September 2002 and was named the Frederick C. Joerg Distinguished Professor of Business Administration in April, 2004. He also holds secondary appointments in Duke’s Department of Economics and School of Law, and is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Cohen is a leading applied economist in the area of technological change and R&D. Much of his research has focused on the determinants of innovative activity and performance both within and across industries, considering the roles of firm size, market structure, firm learning, knowledge flows, university research and the means that firms use to protect their intellectual property. In recent years, much of his work has focused on the economics and management of intellectual property.
He has published in numerous scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, the Economic Journal, Science, The Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Industrial Economics, the Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, Research Policy and the Strategic Management Journal. He also co-edited the recently published volume, Patents in the Knowledge-Based Economy.
He served for five years as a Main Editor for Research Policy and recently served on the National Academies’ Committee on Intellectual Property Rights in the Knowledge-Based Economy, and on the National Academies’ Panel on Research and Development Statistics at the National Science Foundation. He has taught courses on the economics of technological change, industrial organization economics, policy analysis, organizational behavior, corporate strategy, entrepreneurship and the management of intellectual capital.