Wharton professor named FCC chief economist

Beginning this July, Wharton professor Katja Seim will be Penn’s latest Washington, D.C. transplant.

Seim, an associate professor of Business Economics and Public Policy, will join the Federal Communications Commission as the chief economist, a rotating position that is offered to a new academic every one or two years, she said. She will succeed the FCC’s Acting Chief Economist Jonathan Levy, a former professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin. Levy holds a Ph.D in economics from Yale, as does Seim.

As the FCC’s chief economist, Seim will be responsible for offering advice on the economics of policy proposals the FCC is considering. Seim noted that the FCC’s projects are multifaceted, and as such her input will be considered in the context of the legal and social issues specific to the FCC’s policies.

One of the larger issues that the FCC is considering and that will require an economist’s expertise is consumer privacy, Seim said. This means that Seim will have to assess how consumers value different types of privacy measures the FCC adopts.

This is an important part of the Commission’s work, especially after its recent approval of a subsidy of $9.25 per month to enable low-income households to connect to the internet in March 2016.

Accompanying this subsidy’s approval was a proposal to restrict the amount of information broadband providers such as Comcast and Verizon could disclose to advertisers about their client’s Internet profiles without their clients’ consent.

This proposal is pending approval by the end of 2016, and its probability of receiving approval was recently increased following a U.S. Court of Appeals decision on June 14, 2016 to uphold the rules that the FCC established last year forbidding internet providers from choosing the speed and availability at which certain websites and pages can be accessed. Providers can no longer “load” Amazon more quickly than lesser-known websites.

The chief economist will also weigh in on the FCC’s ongoing push to foster more competition within the cable provider industry and to lower annual costs for cable subscribers. The annual rental fee for cable top boxes is steep for subscribers, and the commission is urging cable providers to develop applications that will allow subscribers to view content from multiple providers without the use of a top box.

Seim added that the FCC is also interested in enabling cable subscribers to lease their top boxes from companies other than their content providers, such as Comcast. The top box proposal was approved in a preliminary vote in February, and it is possible that the final vote may take place this August, after Seim has assumed her new role.

Seim expects to return to Wharton in the summer of 2017.

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