Michael Sykuta is an economist and Associate Professor in the Division of Applied Social Sciences at the University of Missouri. He is Executive Director of the Financial Research Institute (FRI), whose programs focus on public utilities regulation and utility industry issues. He is also Co-founder and Director of the Contracting and Organizations Research Institute (CORI), an interdisciplinary research program focused on the economics and law of contracting, organization, and corporate governance.

He currently serves as Program Coordinator for the Managerial, Behavioral and Organizational Economics emphasis in the Agricultural and Applied Economics MS and PhD programs.

Sykuta is an affiliate scholar with the International Center for Law & Economics. He is also co-editor of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN)’s New Institutional Economics eJournal.

His research focuses on contracting practices, firm organization, organizational governance, and the implications of regulation and government programs for firm and industry behavior.  He has published articles in such peer-reviewed journals as Journal of Law and Economics, Financial Review, Journal of Corporate Finance, Antitrust Bulletin, Managerial and Decision Economics, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Review of Agricultural Economics, Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, and Journal of Wine Economics; and book chapters on econometrics of contracting and organizational economics research. He co-edited and published The Elgar Companion to Transaction Cost Economics with Peter G. Klein.

He earned a PhD in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a BS in economics from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Prior to joining the faculty at Missouri in 1998, he was a faculty research associate and lecturer at the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh.