William A. Niskanen is chairman of the Cato Institute, a position he has held since 1985 following service on President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers. He was formerly professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley and UCLA and was an assistant director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Niskanen's most noted work is his Bureaucracy and Representative Government published in 1971, an important work in the field of public management and a strong challenge to the field of public administration in the spirit of Ludwig von Mises' work. The book was for a long time out of print, but was reissued with several additional essays as, William Niskanen, 'Bureaucracy and Public Economics' (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1994). Niskanen's work has become a central text in Rational Choice models of Bureaucracy. In his work he proposed the budget-maximizing model.

Niskanen received his B.A. and Ph.D in economics from Harvard University and the University of Chicago, respectively.

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