The Pardee RAND Graduate School is the only public-policy graduate program specializing in the doctorate degree, and the only one based at a public-policy research organization. From the start, it was regarded as one of the most rigorous policy analysis programs in the country. When RAND launched a graduate school in policy analysis as a five-year experiment in 1970, Wolf became its founding dean. With Wolf at the helm, RAND's Economic Department carried out a vast array of projects that included collecting data on family decision-making in developing countries studying welfare reform, black-white earnings differences and fertility decisions and helping to design the all-volunteer military. Its conclusions encouraged the restructuring of private insurance and helped increase the stature of managed care. His new hires were soon designing the RAND Health Insurance Experiment, begun in 1971 and widely regarded as one of the largest and most important studies of health insurance. His other books included “China and India, 2025: A Comparative Assessment” (2011), “Understanding Iran” (2009) and “Looking Backward and Forward: Policy Issues in the Twenty-First Century” (2008).įrom 1967 to 1981, Wolf led the Economics Department at RAND, hiring and nurturing notable new talent at a time when the institution was working to sustain its highly regarded reputation in national security research while greatly expanding its research on domestic policy. His research focused largely on economic development, particularly in Asia the economics of communist systems and their later transitions to market-oriented societies foreign aid and security assistance and burden-sharing among allies.Ī collection of his wide-ranging essays was published in “Puzzles, Paradoxes, Controversies, and the Global Economy” (2015). And in the early 1960s, he had been the first RAND researcher to visit Vietnam in an official capacity, as an economic expert on a presidential commission assigned to survey the situation in Southeast Asia.Ī prolific researcher, Wolf had nearly 300 academic publications to his name and had written more than a dozen books. His analysis proved prescient when the collapse finally came in 1991. Years before it happened, Wolf predicted the demise of the Soviet Union through economic exhaustion and ethnic dissension. “When Wolf spoke, everyone listened,” Gompert said. Gompert, a senior fellow at RAND, wrote in a 2015 tribute marking Wolf's 60th year at the institution. In the early days of RAND, the Cold War was a dominant issue and Wolf was considered one of “the two or three most authoritative and insightful analysts of Soviet economics,” David C. “And it set an example for the rest of us.” “Their generosity will help ensure that RAND will thrive for years to come,” Rich said during a 2015 speech saluting Wolf's career. Wolf was also committed to RAND as a philanthropist, making major and regular contributions to the graduate school's endowment with his wife, Theresa. He remained professionally active until days before his death, a familiar figure at both RAND's Santa Monica headquarters and Stanford University's Hoover Research Institution, where he was a senior research fellow. Within RAND, Wolf held another unique distinction-he was the first employee to mark 60 years with the institution, joining it as a senior economist on June 23, 1955. And his personal research made impressive scholarly contributions to several fields at critical junctures in time.” “As a leader of our Economics Department and founding dean of our graduate school, he helped shape generations of economists, statisticians and policy analysts. Rich, president and chief executive officer of the RAND Corporation. “Charlie Wolf was a significant figure at RAND for much of its history,” said Michael D. Wolf died Monday of cardiac arrest at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Charles Wolf in a RAND photograph taken early in his careerĬharles Wolf Jr., a leading economist and founding dean of what is now the Pardee RAND Graduate School who was regarded as one of the intellectual founders of modern policy analysis, has died.
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