Dennis N. Epple is a US American economist and currently the Thomas Lord University Professor of Economics at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business.
[4] In terms of professional service, Epple repeatedly served as Head of Economics (1980–84, 2005–14) at CMU and continues to serve on CMU's Steering Committee Program for Interdisciplinary Education Research (2010-) and their Budget and Financial Affairs Committee (2014-).
[13] Additionally, in the 1990s, Epple published a series of influential articles on the topic of learning curves in industrial organisations (with Linda Argote) and product differentiation.
[15] After an early interest in environmental economics, research on the Tiebout hypothesis,[16] led Dennis Epple to adopt a perspective framed by competition between different localities;[17] this perspective is present in much of his research on public and political economics, including school competition.
In further research on interjurisdictional competition with Thomas Romer and Radu Filimon, Epple has explored the conditions under which there is an equilibrium between mobile consumers' choices in terms of housing location and public goods provision[18][19] and how much scope for local redistribution there is if taxpayers are mobile[20] or differ in preferences and incomes.
[21] In research with Holger Sieg (and Thomas Romer) in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Epple has further investigated the estimation of structural general equilibrium models of interjurisdictional competition.
[33] These findings have led Epple and Romano to caution that the introduction of municipal school choice programmes may drive wealthy households out of the city centers into the suburbs.