Orley Clark Ashenfelter (born October 18, 1942)[2] is an American economist and the Joseph Douglas Green 1895 Professor of Economics emeritus at Princeton University.

Ashenfelter received a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 1970, having completed a doctoral dissertation titled "Racial discrimination and labor markets".

[3][4] He has been director of the Office of Evaluation of the U.S. Department of Labor, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol.

Orley Ashenfelter has provided expert economic testimony in numerous legal cases, including U.S. v. Apple (which focused on price-fixing in the market for eBooks), and the 1997 review of the proposed merger between Office Depot and Staples Inc.[7] In 1998, he and Richard Posner co-founded American Law and Economics Review, and served jointly as editors-in-chief from then until 2005.

[8] Since the early 1990s, Ashenfelter has actively participated in the process of restoration of doctoral education and research in economics in the Czech Republic.