# Philip J. Cook

Philip Jackson Cook (born October 15, 1946) is an American economist. He is Terry Sanford Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University. He is best known for his research on the economics of crime, particularly gun violence. His other major research areas include health and safety regulation, including alcohol taxation and the societal costs of drinking; the economics of state lotteries; and income distribution.

## Career

Cook received a bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan in 1968 and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1973. While studying at Berkeley, Cook discovered a proof of the Slutsky equation which was much shorter than the then-standard proof; he published his alternative proof in a short paper for The American Economic Review in 1972, his first publication.
Cook joined the Duke faculty as an assistant professor in 1973, shortly after the establishment of the university's Sanford Institute of Public Policy. He served as head of the Sanford Institute from 1985-1989 and again from 1997-1999. Since 2017 he has held the titles of Terry Sanford Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke.
Cook has served as vice chair of the National Research Council’s Committee on Law and Justice. He has also been on a number of National Academy of Sciences panels on topics related to violent crime and alcohol.
Cook is an honorary fellow of the American Society of Criminology and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. He was awarded the 2020 Stockholm Prize in Criminology for his research on gun violence.

## Research
### Gun violence

Cook has worked extensively on the topic of violent crime, and particularly gun violence in the United States. In the 1970s, he began to investigate the variable density and availability of firearms among US states, and showed that they correlate with various forms of lethal gun violence including suicide by firearm and death by armed robbery. The techniques Cook developed for this analysis have since been adopted by other researchers in the field.
He has authored three books on the topic of gun violence and policy. His 2000 book Gun Violence: The Real Costs with Jens Ludwig presents a view on gun violence from an economic perspective. The book applies a framework for valuing "irreplaceable commodities" which Cook developed earlier in his career to calculate a holistic figure of 80 billion dollars for the total cost of gun violence in the United States in a recent year. He edited Evaluating Gun Policy, which was published in 2003 by the Brookings Institution. He co-authored The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know with Kristin Goss; it was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. He co-authored the book Policing Gun Violence: Strategic Reforms for Controlling Our Most Pressing Crime Problem with Anthony Braga, published in 2023.

### Alcohol

A major area of Cook's research since the 1970s has been the study of public policy measures to curb the societal harms associated with alcohol, including alcoholism, drunk driving, and underage drinking. In a 1982 paper with George Tauchen, Cook argued for the efficacy of alcohol taxes – then an unpopular position. Using different tax rates among states as a natural experiment, they showed that increases in the tax rate on liquor were associated with a reduction in the consumption of heavy drinkers and in liver cirrhosis mortality. His 2007 book Paying the Tab: the Costs and Benefits of Alcohol reviews the history of and body of research around alcohol control measures and argues that US legislators have neglected supply-side policies, including higher excise taxes.

### Inequality

Cook's most cited work is his 1995 book The Winner Take-All Society, written with Robert Frank. The book examines the trend of rising economic inequality since the 1970s and argues that technological advances are increasing the reach of the highest performers, allowing them to capture an increasingly disproportionate share of earnings. They see the system of extremely well-paid "superstars", which previously existed only in areas like sports and entertainment, being replicated in other economic sectors. They further warn that this trend has the risk of leading to a misallocation of human capital by diverting too many talented individuals – who overestimate their likelihood of success – to "winner-take-all markets" at the expense of other career opportunities.

## Selected works

* 2023, with Anthony Braga: Policing Gun Violence: Strategic Reforms for Controlling Our Most Pressing Crime Problem ISBN 9780199929283
* 2014, 2020(2nd edition) with Kristin A. Goss: The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know ISBN 9780199338993, ISBN 9780190073466
* 2007: Paying the Tab: The Economics of Alcohol Policy ISBN 9780691125206
* 2002, with Jens Ludwig: Gun Violence: The Real Costs ISBN 9780195153842
* 1996, with Robert H. Frank: The Winner-Take-All Society ISBN 9780140259957
* 1989, 1991(paperback), with Charles T. Clotfelter: Selling Hope: State Lotteries in America ISBN 0674800982, ISBN 978-0674800984