Kenneth J. Button

Photo of Kenneth J. Button
Titles and Organizations

University Professor Emeritus of Policy and Government

Contact Information

kbutton@gmu.edu
Phone: 703-993-4647
Fax: 703-993-1574
Fairfax Campus, Aquia Building, Room 539
4400 University Drive
Fairfax, VA 22030
MSN: 3F4

Biography

Kenneth Button is a professor of public policy at the George Mason University Schar School of Policy and Government and a world-renowned expert on transportation policy. He has published, or has in press, some 80 books and more than 400 academic papers in the field of transport economics, transport planning, environmental analysis, and industrial organization. Some of his recent books include Airline Deregulation: An International Perspective (David Fulton Publishing), Flying into the Future: Air Transport Policy in the European Union (Edward Elgar Publishing), Handbook of Transport Modelling (Pergamon Press), Transport, the Environment and Sustainable Development (E & FN Spon publishing), Meta-analysis in Environmental Economics (Kluwer), and Air Transport Networks (Edward Elgar Publishing).

Before coming to the Schar School, Button was an advisor to the Secretary General of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development where he headed up the OECD work on International Aviation (which produced The Future of International Air Transport Policy: Responding to Global Change).

He has previously held visiting academic posts at the University of British Columbia and the University of California at Berkeley. In the two years prior to his secondment to the OECD, he completed consultancy work for the ICAO in Brazil as well as studies for the European Union, Transport Canada, the European Conference of Ministers of Transport, the UN-DDSMS, and the World Bank. Button was a director of the transport consultancy firm Pearce, Sharp and Associates which specialized in work on transport. He was the Special Advisor to the U.K. House of Common Transport Committee between 1993 and 1994. In 1990, he had been seconded to the OECD to assist in the preparation of documentation for its five yearly meeting of Ministers of Environment.

Since 1996, Button has contributed invited presentations to international conferences in the U.K., Canada, France, the Netherlands, Australia, Cyprus, Belgium, Japan, Taiwan, Spain, Sweden, Germany, Chile, Italy, South Africa, and Korea as well as in the U.S. he has testified before the U.S. Congress on air transport issues. He serves as editor of the leading international academic journals Transportation Research Part D: Transport and the Environment and the Journal of Air Transport Management, and sits on the editorial boards of nine other journals. He is on the scientific committee of the World Conference on Transport Research and the Advisory Board of the Air Transport Research Group.

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Areas of Research

  • Economics of Privatization and Regulation
  • Environmental Economics
  • Regional Economics
  • Transport Planning
  • Transportation Economics
  • Urban Economics