I was very saddened to learn about the death of Andy Schmitz on October 8, 2026. Andy was a mentor, a colleague, and a friend, and I owe him a lot, both as a scholar and as a person. He was extremely important to me when I was a graduate student and a young faculty member. In many ways, he taught me the ropes about where and how to publish.

I knew about Andy before I came to Berkeley. When I was in Israel preparing to leave, Professor Asher Razin asked me why I was going to Berkeley when I had other opportunities. But then he added, “There is one guy there who is publishing all the time in journals. His name is Schmitz.” When I asked my friend Gershon Feder about the people there, he told me that the leading figures were Kuznets, de Janvry, and Schmitz. Kuznets was a fantastic teacher. De Janvry was in Chile when I arrived, and Schmitz was king of the coffee room.

Room 325 in Giannini Hall was our coffee room. During the year I arrived in the department (1973), some of the graduate students would play cards with some faculty members every day between 10 and 10:30. Others would sit in the room, talking and discussing economics with Andy.

Andy was a character. He had a farm in Saskatchewan, and his mood often depended on the weather on his farm. He would talk with everybody on every topic, and he made you feel like an equal. He used diagrams for his economic analysis, and he had incredible economic intuition and an ability to develop an analysis that addressed a practical situation.

Andy the mentor

I had received my undergraduate degree and taken some master’s-level classes at Tel Aviv University. My impression of economics was that it used very complex mathematical tools to prove common-sense propositions and develop very useful formulas and procedures for policymaking. I did not really understand the moral, ethical, and political importance of economic analysis until I met Andy.

Andy was a big believer in welfare economics. He argued that an efficient outcome was not enough. Whenever there was a change, it was very important to him to understand who gained, who lost, by how much, and what happened to the losers. Was there a way to compensate them?

He applied this approach to many problems. One of his most important papers—and, in my view, one of the top five papers ever produced in the department—was his paper on the tomato harvester, published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.^[1] It was part of a huge controversy. The paper argued that the tomato harvester improved the overall economic well-being of California, but the gains went mostly to farmers and consumers, while the big losers were farmworkers. This paper was very important in the fight to develop mechanisms to compensate farmworkers who lost their jobs because of new technology, and to create institutions that could help them. The impact of the debate surrounding this paper continues to this day.

Another thing I learned from Andy was the importance of market structure. Andy was a trade theorist, and he taught me that, when it comes to trade and markets, the competitive model is a nice metaphor and a great benchmark, but it does not always reflect reality. Markets have several levels, and we need to understand the relationships between them. Is there a monopoly? Is there a monopsony? In many cases, there is a middleman. A middleman is a company that may have monopoly power toward its customers and monopsony power toward its suppliers. Apple, for example, has unique products, and it makes a lot of money because it can exercise market power on both sides, in its dealings with suppliers and consumers.

When you worked with Andy and raised a problem, the discussion often led to a journal article. At the time, in the early 1970s, we lived in an era of price controls aimed at protecting consumers. Andy pointed out that much of the analysis behind these policies assumed that there were three main players in the economy—producers of food and other products, consumers, and the government—and ignored intermediaries. One paper resulting from this insight appeared in the American Economic Review^[2]. We developed a formula to calculate the errors resulting from price-support policies that ignore middlemen and derived alternative policies that take their existence into account. Another “coffee room” paper appeared in Science magazine in 1979^[3]. It was written in response to suggestions to slow technological change in order to preserve workers’ income, especially in agriculture. We suggested interventions that would capture the net benefits of technological progress without harming workers—such as worker retraining and severance compensation programs—rather than halting technological growth.

A scholar who helped build the department

As Alain de Janvry noted in his heartfelt tribute to Andy, Andy always emphasized that being agricultural economists does not prevent us from publishing in top economics journals. The opposite is true: we are exposed to real-world problems, and we can use them to develop sophisticated models that can enrich the mainstream economic literature. We should have a balanced portfolio: papers in mainstream journals like the American Economic Review and Econometrica, papers in agricultural economics journals, and papers in journals like Science. He practiced what he taught. In the 1980s, he published fifteen papers with students and other collaborators in top mainstream economics journals, in addition to numerous papers in agricultural economics journals. These papers offered theoretical insights and useful lessons, even though they might not have been the most complex. Andy also influenced the research methods of applied economists through his practical, classic book on applied welfare economics^[4], coauthored with his students Richard Just and Darrell Hueth.

Andy’s leadership and academic achievements were very important in the early 1970s, when the department was on the brink of closure. Andy actively supported our chair, Jim Bowles, in getting new positions and recruiting Richard Just, whose arrival was a turning point for the department. I remember Andy’s excitement about the hiring of Michael Hanemann and Irma Adelman. He told us that, with these additions, we were climbing to the top of environmental and development economics. Andy was one of the few representatives of the department at the AAEA meetings in the 1970s, and in 1985 he became the department’s first AAEA Fellow since I had joined the faculty. Andy was also among the effort to bring a senior Ag Economist to Chair the department in the late 70s to push it to the top, an effort that led to the selection of Gordon Rausser as Chair and a lasting period of eminence of the department. 

Andy was chairman of the department from 1989 to 1993. During that period, California voters considered Big Green, a proposition to phase out the use of pesticides on crops. Drawing on research we had done, mostly for the EPA, we organized a conference on the topic. We argued that pesticides needed to be regulated, but a blanket ban did not make sense: our research suggested that the social benefits of appropriately managed pesticide use could substantially exceed the costs. We faced considerable political pressure against this effort, and Andy stood firmly behind me. He was strong in defending me and my right to present the research. Later, a paper based on our work on pesticides appeared in Science magazine^[5].

Long lasting career and friendships

Andy left the department as part of an early retirement program and moved to the University of Florida in 1994. In Florida, he continued to be an active researcher and mentored a lot of younger economists, in particular Chuck Moss, Krishna Kramer, and his son, Troy Schmitz, to produce several edited volumes and papers. He kept his knack for addressing emerging, controversial problems. He and his co-authors applied a public choice theory and political economy models to explain how lobby groups shape tariffs, subsidies, and farm policy to produce a book on agricultural policy, Agribusiness, and Rent-Seeking Behavior^[6]. He continued to develop elegant models to explain and quantify how government compensate strong interest groups in order to modify federal program (elimination of the tobacco and peanut programs)^[7].  About 15 years ago, he led the writing of a book on an emerging topic at the time, The Economics of Alternative Energy Sources and Globalization^[8].  

Andy and Carole were always a warm and friendly couple. Their home was a place where faculty and students mingled. You could spend time there relaxing with distinguished professors like Irma Adelman and with students who had just arrived. We would have a good dinner, the wine would flow, and we would talk and sing. Andy had a great voice, and Carol was a good pianist, and everyone had a good time. Andy was very perceptive, and during periods of stress in our lives, including during my divorce, he made sure to invite us to dinner or festivities in his home. Their house also hosted departmental parties and other events, and our children grew up with the department. For many of us, including me as a first-year student, it felt like a second home.

Over the years, we shared many experiences. I visited Andy’s home village in Saskatchewan, and we traveled together extensively around the world. Andy and I organized a conference in Costa Rica, where we had a great time exploring the tropical forest, traveling by boat through the jungle, enjoying the wildlife, and making friends.

I visited him several times after he moved to the University of Florida in Gainesville. Leorah and I stayed with Andy and Carole for a week and had a great trip together to St. Augustine and other places in Florida. Another visit coincided with the terrible day when Prime Minister Rabin was killed. Andy and Carol were extremely supportive during that very difficult moment for me. On another occasion, I gave a seminar and went on a fishing trip with Andy and his faculty colleagues. In 1999, we co-organized a conference in Gainesville on climate change. It was extremely well attended, and Florida officials expressed a great deal of concern about climate change because they worried that parts of the Everglades would be lost. I always loved meeting Andy at AEA conferences. Even two years ago, he showed me on a napkin a nice, clever theoretical result that he was able to draw geometrically, and we spoke about papers and collaboration. He was a real scholar to the end. He really loved economics. He loved people. He loved his family, and we will all miss him.

Andy’s friends and colleagues recognize his contributions and he has an appreciation club in the AAEA. His excellence was also recognized at the University of Florida by citation at the University of Florida.

---

^[1] Schmitz, Andrew, and David Seckler. “Mechanized agriculture and social welfare: The case of the tomato harvester.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 52, no. 4 (1970): 569-577.

^[2] Just, Richard E., Andrew Schmitz, and David Zilberman. “Price controls and optimal export policies under alternative market structures.” The American Economic Review 69, no. 4 (1979): 706-714.

^[3] Just, Richard E., Andrew Schmitz, and David Zilberman. “Technological Change in Agriculture: The sources, diffusion, and social imports of technological change in agriculture are examined.” Science 206, no. 4424 (1979): 1277-1280.

^[4] Just, Richard E., Darrell L. Hueth, and Andrew Schmitz. Applied Welfare Economics and Public Policy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982.

^[5]  Zilberman, David, Andrew Schmitz, Gary Casterline, Erik Lichtenberg, and Jerome B. Siebert. “The economics of pesticide use and regulation.” Science 253, no. 5019 (1991): 518-522.

[6] Schmitz, Andrew, Norbert L. Wilson, Charles B. Moss, and David Zilberman. The economics of alternative energy sources and globalization. Bentham Science Publishers, 2012.

^[7] Schmitz, Andrew, Dwayne Haynes, and Troy G. Schmitz. “The not-so-simple economics of production quota buyouts.” Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics 48, no. 2 (2016): 119-147.