Department of Economics

Dean Lueck is Professor of Economics and Affiliated Faculty at the Mauer School of Law. From 2016 to 2022 he was founding director of the Program on Natural Resource Governance at the Ostrom Workshop where he is now a Faculty Affiliate. His areas of research are the economics of contracts and property rights, economic organization, law and economics, and environmental-natural resource economics. He has been a guest lecturer and visiting faculty member at many colleges and universities in the United States and abroad. He has served as John M. Olin Faculty Fellow in Law and Economics at the Yale Law School and as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law and Economics at the University of Toronto. He is the co-author (with Douglas W. Allen) of The Nature of the Farm (MIT Press 2003) and a contributing co-editor (with Karen Bradshaw) of Wildfire Policy: Law and Economics Perspectives (Resources for the Future Press, 2012). He has published numerous articles in such journals as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Law and Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, and the RAND Journal of Economics. He was a Lone Mountain Fellow at PERC in August 2015 where he worked on the economics of environmental agencies. His current research projects include the economic behavior of environmental agencies, the economics of land demarcation, and the economics of wildfire management. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Washington, his M.S. in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana, and his B.A. in Biology (Magna Cum Laude) from Gonzaga University. Prior to his academic career he was a smokejumper with the U.S. Forest Service in McCall, Idaho.