Evan Kwerel

Senior Economic Advisor, Office of Economics and Analytics, Federal Communications Commission

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Evan Kwerel is Senior Economic Advisor in the Office of Economics and Analytics at the Federal Communications Commission. He has worked on a broad range of spectrum policy issues and has been a proponent of market-based approaches to spectrum management. He conceived the “broadcast incentive auction” - the world’s first two-sided auction to repurpose spectrum - and helped shape the bill to authorize it. After Congress enacted authorizing legislation, he was the key policy advisor on the Incentive Auction Task Force. The broadcast incentive auction concluded in 2017, reallocating 84 MHz of television broadcast spectrum nationwide to meet the growing demand for mobile broadband services. In 1993, after Congress granted the FCC auction authority, he was the primary architect of the FCC's innovative simultaneous multiple round auction methodology. He was also a major intellectual force in the development of price caps as a replacement for rate-of-return regulation and reforming the regulation of international telecom facilities and rates. From 1976 to 1982, he was an assistant professor of economics at Yale University. In 1981 he was a Brookings Economic Policy Fellow, and from 1982 to 1983, he was a senior economist with the President's Council of Economic Advisers. He joined the FCC in 1983. In 1995 he received the Federal Communications Commission’s Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Service. In 2009 the Federal Communications Bar Association awarded him the Excellence in Government Service Award. He received the Presidential Rank Award in 2012. Dr. Kwerel received his B.A. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 and his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976.