Bullock, Charles Jesse (1869–1941)

Abstract

Bullock was born in Boston on 21 May 1869. Trained partly by correspondence course directed by R.T. Ely, he graduated from Boston University in 1892 while employed as a high school principal, a combination not uncommon at the time. Following his Wisconsin Ph.D. in 1895 he taught economics at Cornell, Williams (1899–1903) and Harvard (1903–34), where he directed the Committee on Economic Research from 1917 to 1929. While public finance was his principal field, he also made contributions to international economics, which was unusual before 1914, and the history of economics. The author of several successful textbooks, his major theoretical contribution was ‘The Law of Variable Proportions’ (1902). He served as adviser on taxation in Massachusetts and other states, and was president of the National Tax Association from 1917 to 1919.