A senior economist at ERG since 1995 and an ERG vice president, Dr. Calvin Franz performs research and regulatory impact analyses for many different federal and private clients. His work continually exposes him to economic issues associated with a wide range of industries, subindustries, products, and technologies. He has managed and prepared regulatory impact analyses for rulemakings by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and U.S. Department of Labor, including DOL’s Wage and Hour Division, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and Mine Safety and Health Administration. He also enjoys nonregulatory research, such as teaming with clinicians at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital to perform cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analyses on health care issues and interventions.

Cal particularly enjoys developing analytic models and methods to answer clients’ questions in areas that require unique solutions, and he has managed many projects with this challenge. For example, he used a random effects model of matched case-control data to estimate the cost of iatrogenic injuries in hospital critical care units and, for the National Quality Forum, he applied meta-analysis and Monte Carlo methods to estimate cost confidence intervals of health care-associated infections. In other examples, he estimated the distribution of firm income by industry and firm size based on the variances and covariances of Economic Census data; used cross-price elasticities and simultaneous equations to solve for regulatory impacts on multiple related markets; and developed an approach for analyzing foodborne illness that differentiates the risk inherent in different types of food from the volume consumed.

Cal received his B.A. from Gordon College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from Indiana University. Outside work, he enjoys spending time with his family, travel, kayaking, and reading—especially on a porch with a magnificent view.