Centre News

Assistant professor of economics John Perry

Each month, Centre College assistant professor of economics Dr. John Perry will be offering financial advice in a new column in Lexington’s Herald-Leader. In the question-and-answer style column, Perry tackles issues from down payments on homes to saving for college to mutual funds.

“The beauty of a Q&A column is that there is a large public-good aspect to it,” Perry says. “What I mean is that by having a person with some credibility answer an individual’s question, anyone who might have a similar question is answered simultaneously. While the world is full of individuals, I’ve found that most of them have similar problems, concerns and questions with respect to personal finance. A Q&A column is an efficient way to help alleviate those.”

Having had “a long personal and professional interest in personal finance,” Perry says he can “remember thinking in high school about different forms of insurance, investing techniques, different investment products, etc. I’d even race home after school to check the stock market; this was before the rise of the Internet. I soon discovered that I was an oddity and most people dreaded thinking about personal finance. To me, it’s pure fun. To others, it’s a source of great anxiety.”

He says that “being an economist, people assumed I was an expert on finance—and interestingly, most economists do not think about the stock market and finance all that often—and started asking questions. And I started answering them. To this day, any time there is a blip in the financial markets, I’m deluged with calls from friends and family. As you can imagine, I’ve been quite busy as of late.”

Perry, who graduated from Centre in 2000 and earned a M.S. and Ph.D. at the University of Kentucky, is an applied microeconomist whose primary areas of expertise are labor and health economics.

At the College, he teaches core courses in economics such as principles of economics, intermediate microeconomics and econometrics. Since joining the Centre faculty in 2007, he has taught a wide array of field courses, including health economics, labor economics, public policy economics, and risk management and insurance.

Before returning to Centre, Perry was staff economist for the Legislative Research Commission of the Kentucky General Assembly. In this position, he performed non-partisan research and policy analysis for policy makers and staff.

To read Perry’s first Herald-Leader finance column, click here.