Paul Courant
American economist
Paul N. Courant (born January 5, 1948) is an American economist who is an expert in public goods. His recent research focuses on the economics of universities, the economics of libraries and archives, and the impact of new information technologies on the scholarly publishing system.
Education
Courant received his BA in history from Swarthmore College in 1968; an MA in economics from Princeton University in 1973; and a PhD in economics from Princeton University in 1974.
Career
Before attending graduate school, Courant served as a research assistant at the Brookings Institution. After receiving his PhD, he joined the faculty at the University of Michigan, where he has remained. In 1979 and 1980 he was a Senior Staff Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers. From 2002 to 2005 he served as Provost and Executive Vice-president for Academic Affairs, the chief academic officer and the chief budget officer of the university. While Provost, he negotiated a contract with Google to allow them to digitize the entire contents of Michigan's library for their Google Books Library Project now known as Google Books. He has also served as the Associate Provost for Academic and Budgetary Affairs, Chair of the Department of Economics and Director of the Institute of Public Policy Studies (which is now the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy). He served as the University Librarian and Dean of Libraries from 2007 to 2013.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Paul Courant” as american economist. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american economist. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 4, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7149987. VIAF identifies the subject as 77502736. The Library of Congress control number is n82215727. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1948, 1968, 1973 and 1974.
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This entry incorporates text from “Paul Courant” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.