Scott H Irwin

Dr. Scott H. Irwin is recognized as a national and international leader in agricultural economics. His research on agricultural marketing and price analysis, commodity market efficiency, and speculation in commodity markets is widely-cited by other academic researchers and in high demand among market participants, policy-makers, and the media. He has produced over 200 scholarly publications in his career, with numerous articles in the leading academic journals of his field, such as the American Journal of Agricultural Economics and the Review of Agricultural Economics. Irwin’s research and outreach programs have had a significant and positive impact on the agricultural community. Examples include: ƒ AgMAS – Irwin is co-director of this nationally-recognized project that provides performance evaluations of agricultural market advisory services. ƒ farmdoc – Irwin serves as the team leader of this award-winning Extension program that provides comprehensive risk management information and analysis for farmers and agribusinesses in the United States. Irwin recently led the effort to create farmgate, a sister-site designed to integrate, synthesize, and summarize the information available to Midwest farmers and agribusinesses across the spectrum of agricultural disciplines. Dr. Irwin and his collaborators have received more than $4 million in competitive grants to support these research and outreach programs. In recent years, Irwin has made important contributions to the international debate on the role of speculators in commodity futures markets. He has been widely quoted as a leading authority on futures speculation in the financial press (e.g., Barron’s, The Economist, Institutional Investor and The Wall Street Journal). He has written an op-ed piece for The New York Times and his research has been featured in an article published in the business section of the Times. Irwin has offered testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Agriculture, and he has presented invited papers to various professional organizations and universities. He has also written two guest postings for Econbrowser, one of the world’s most popular general economics blogsites. Irwin’s lifelong fascination with agricultural economics began at an early age on the family farm in west central Iowa. Trips to the local grain elevator sparked his interest in ag marketing and price analysis, and he pursued that interest at Iowa State University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in agricultural business. Irwin went on to earn both an M.S. and a Ph.D. in agricultural economics at Purdue University. Irwin joined the faculty of the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology at The Ohio State University in 1985. He was named the Francis B. McCormick Professor of Agricultural Marketing and Policy at Ohio State in 1996. During 1993-1994, Irwin served as a Visiting Scholar in the Office for Futures and Options Research at the University of Illinois. In 1997, he joined the faculty of the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois; he was named the Laurence J. Norton Chair of Agricultural Marketing in 2004. Irwin currently teaches courses on commodity price analysis and futures market research.