A CIRANO Associate Researcher and Fellow since 2002, Harry J. Paarsch is Professor in the College of Business Administration at the University of Central Florida.

Holding a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University, his primary research interests are in applied econometrics, particularly as applied to forestry economics and, specifically, the use of auctions to sell timber as well as to procure treeplanting services. In fact, his interest in auctions grew out of his policy work concerning British Columbia forestry.

He has held full-time appointments at the University of British Columbia and the University of Western Ontario as well as the University of Iowa and the University of Melbourne, and has been a visiting professor at Aarhus Universitet, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Helsingin yliopisto, the University of New South Wales, and Stanford University.

He held the Arch W. Shaw National Fellowship at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, which is located on the campus of Stanford University, and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Institut d'économie industrielle (IDEI) (Toulouse, France), at the Institute for Economic Analysis (IAE-CSIC) (Bellaterra, Spain), at the Center for Economic Institutions at the Institute of Economic Research of Hitotsubashi University (Kunitachi, Japan), at the Collegio Carlo Alberto (Torino, Italy), and at the Gary Becker Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago.

He has published journal articles in both applied and theoretical econometrics as well as computational economics, empirical finance, industrial organization, labour economics, and personnel economics.

With Han Hong, he has written a book about the structural econometric analysis of field data from auctions; with Timothy P. Hubbard he has written a book about auctions; and with Konstantin Golyaev he has written a practical guide to the computational methods at the heart of modern quantitative research.

From July 2011 until September 2014, he worked as an economist for Amazon.com, Inc. in Seattle,Washington, initially on the Economics Team, then on the Global Inventory Platform on the Inventory Policy Analytics Team, and finally on the Machine Learning Seller-Services Platform Team of the Consumer Website.