James Nolan

Biography

Dr. James Nolan is a Professor in the department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Saskatchewan. Dr. Nolan received his doctorate in economics from the University of California, Irvine. As well as being actively involved in transportation and agricultural policy issues at the federal and provincial level in Canada, Dr. Nolan has also published extensively on topics in transportation and agricultural economics, focusing mostly on modern freight transportation and the structure of these markets. He has been active on many university and international professional committees and has also served as a co-editor for journals in his fields of expertise. Finally, Dr. Nolan has taught several different courses covering both economic theory and applications, and has supervised numerous Master’s and Doctoral theses.

Research Interest

While transportation and agriculture are broad research fields, I have focused my primary research in the narrower but historically important field of agricultural transportation. To this end, I have used a variety of tools (i.e. econometric, computational) to study the nature of competition and market structure in agricultural transportation markets, particularly in the trucking and rail sectors used for grain movements across Western Canada. I am also interested in further exploring the use of geographic information systems (GIS) to support spatial economic analysis of infrastructure capacity in freight transportation. Given my affiliation with the Social Science Research Laboratory at the U. of Saskatchewan, I am also developing several economic experiments to study on-going agricultural transportation issues, particularly with respect to the evolving structure of modern agricultural supply chains and the changing interface among supply chain participants. And most recently, I am expanding my research towards other key freight modes, particularly the maritime freight sector (the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway) in order to examine how this market has affected agricultural and other bulk shippers in Canada and the U.S.