Owen Irvine was a faculty member in the Department from 1982 until his retirement in 2012.
Owen Irvine earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Duke University in 1969. After working for two years as an engineer for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, he then earned a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT in 1976. Prior to joining our department, Owen was Assistant Professor of Economics at Wesleyan University, an Economic Policy Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a Research Economist at the Research and Statistics Division of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
Irvine is an internationally respected expert on inventory behavior and housing markets and their interaction with business cycles and the macroeconomic performance of the economy. Notable articles were published in the American Economic Review, the Canadian Journal of Economics, the Southern Economic Journal, and Economic Inquiry, among many others. He has served as a visiting scholar at Boston University and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, where he studied long-term trends in U.S. inventories.
Owen served on the Board of Directors for the International Society for Inventory Research, and he has served as a consultant to a variety of local Michigan governments and trade associations on housing market regulations.
In the classroom, Owen particularly enjoyed teaching macroeconomics, monetary economics, and money and banking to advanced undergraduates and those topics as well as economic forecasting to MBA students.
While at MSU, Owen and his wife Melinda lived in Okemos, Michigan.