James Peoples is Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley and his BA in Economics from the California State University Dominguez Hills. He was a 1988-1989 Ford Foundation Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a visiting scholar at Northwestern University from 1996 to 1997. He is also a board member of the National Economics Association and an L 'Institute Fellow at the University of Ferrara, Italy.

His areas of specialty are applied microeconomics, regulation, labor economics and corporate merger activity. His articles have appeared in the American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, Journal of Economic Perspectives, the Journal of Law and Economics, the Journal of Regulatory Economics, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Review of Black Political Economy, as well as in other scholarly journals. He is also the editor of Regulatory Reform and Labor Markets and co-author of Microeconomic Problems, with Edwin Mansfield.