Bruce Allen was a faculty member in the Department from 1965 until his retirement in 2003.
Bruce earned a BA in Economics from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, an MBA from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Cornell University.
Bruce’s research and publications supported the idea that the fine details of industry structure were important to understanding the behavior of firms in an industry. He was an expert in the Portland cement industry. Cement is a homogeneous product with narrow geographic markets. Bruce leveraged changes in various elements of the industry structure over time and variations in structure in different regions to argue that vertical integration does change the behavior of firms. For example, he argued that foreign ownership of firms does in fact change the way in which the firms interact. He also studied the structure of gasoline markets, arguing that the vertically integrated majors and the independent gasoline distributors should be counted differently in understanding gasoline pricing.
He taught industrial organization, applied microeconomics, and managerial economics to both undergraduate and MBA students. He was especially proud to have taught in the Executive MBA program in Troy, Michigan for 38 years. Related to his MBA teaching, Bruce was the author of the textbook Managerial Economics, first published in 1994 by Harper Collins.
Bruce was a long-time member of Eastminster Presbyterian Church in East Lansing, where he was a ruling elder and treasurer. A lover of music, he sang with the Michigan State University Choral Union for more than 25 years and was an avid supporter of the Lansing Symphony Orchestra. Among his colleagues and friends, Bruce was especially known as a lover of trains, both model and actual.
Bruce and his wife Ginny lived in East Lansing. He died in 2019.