W. Kip Viscusi is Vanderbilt University's first University Distinguished Professor, with primary appointments in the Owen Graduate School of Management and the Department of Economics as well as at the Law School. He is co-director of the Ph.D. Program in Law and Economics, launched at Vanderbilt in 2007. Professor Viscusi came to Vanderbilt from Harvard Law School, where he was the John F. Cogan Jr. Professor of Law and Economics and Director of the Program on Empirical Legal Studies.

Professor Viscusi received his A.B. degree in economics summa cum laude from Harvard, where he also received his A.M. in economics, M.P.P. in public policy, and Ph.D. in economics. He received awards for best undergraduate thesis and best doctoral dissertation in economics at Harvard. Viscusi also received the Best Article of the Year Award from the Western Economic Association in 1988 and from the Royal Economic Society in 1999. His books were awarded the Kulp-Wright Award for Outstanding Book on Risk and Insurance from the American Risk & Insurance Association in 1992, 1993, 1994, and 2000. The ARIA also awarded him the Mehr Article Award in 1999. Economic Inquiry named Professor Viscusi the second most productive economist based on articles published over the past decade in major economics journals. In 1998, the Journal of Risk and Insurance ranked him as the leading contributor to the risk and insurance literature, and in 2003 Health Economics ranked him as the leading contributor to the health economics literature. He was also ranked by the Journal of the European Economic Association in 2003 as number seven among economists in the world based on journal articles published, 1990-2000, and number twenty-five based on citations in journal articles over that period.
 

Professor Viscusi's research focuses primarily on individual and societal responses to risk and uncertainty. He has published over 20 books and 300 articles, most of which deal with different aspects of health and safety risks. Viscusi’s honorary Arne Ryde lectures given at Lund University, Sweden were published as Rational Risk Policy (Oxford: Clarendon-Oxford University Press, 1998). He has also written, with John Vernon and Joseph Harrington, the fourth edition of Economics of Regulation and Antitrust (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), which is the leading textbook in the field and has been adopted at over 100 universities. Another recent book is Smoke-Filled Rooms: A Postmortem on the Tobacco Deal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
 

Viscusi’s estimates of the value of risks to life and health are currently used throughout the Federal government. The Washington Post designated him the "Reagan Administration's expert on the value of life." He has consulted to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the U.S. Department of Justice on issues pertaining to the valuation of life and health. Professor Viscusi also served on the Science Advisory Board of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for seven years and is currently on the EPA Homeland Security Committee.
 

Professor Viscusi has been the Allen Professor of Economics at Duke University, Professor of Economics at Northwestern University, and the Olin Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. Professor Viscusi also served as Deputy Director of the Council of Wage and Price Stability in the Carter White House.
 

Viscusi is the founding editor of the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, which he continues to publish at Vanderbilt, and has served on the editorial boards of twelve other journals, including the American Economic Review and the Review of Economics and Statistics. He is also the founding editor of Foundations and Trends: Microeconomics. He was the Associate Reporter on the American Law Institute report, Enterprise Responsibility for Personal Injury. He is an expert in a variety of areas of litigation, including risk perceptions, economic damages, product liability, and hazard warnings.