Professor Richards received his Ph.D. from Yale in May 1981. He joined the Tufts faculty as an Assistant Professor in September 1985. He has also taught at Queen's University, Hamilton College, and the Sloan School of Management, and has served as a consultant to the Federal Trade Commission. From September 1989 to June 1998, he directed the Graduate Program in Economics at Tufts. Professor Richards' early research focused on: 1) wage and price behavior across different industries; and 2) the politics of macroeconomic policy. More recent work addresses issues of competition and product quality, and especially on the economic impact of mergers. His papers have appeared in: the American Economic Review; the Journal of Business; Economica, the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking; the Quarterly Journal of Economics; Public Choice; the Southern Economic Journal; the Journal of Macroeconomics; and the Journal of Industrial Economics. With Lynne Pepall and George Norman, he is a co-author of Industrial Organization: Contemporary Theory and Practice, now in its third edition.