Mark Bils

About Mark Bils

Mark Bils (December 1, 1958) is a macroeconomist at the University of Rochester. Bils obtained his PhD in economics from MIT in 1985 and BA in economics from Ohio State University in 1979. He has taught at the University of Chicago GSB and is currently professor and chair of the Department of Economics at the University of Rochester. In 1987, Bils published The Cyclical Behavior of Marginal Cost and Price in the American Economic Review where he argued that marginal cost is procyclical. This is driven from the counterintuitive fact that employment is high when wages are high. Thus, Bils argues, an increase untrained labor must increase marginal costs (in the same way an increase in demand increases wages).