Emory Richard Johnson (March 22, 1864 – March 8, 1950) was a United States economist who specialized in transportation issues.
Johnson was born in Waupun, Wisconsin.[1] He studied at University of Wisconsin (1888) and University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D., 1893). He was instructor of economics at Haverford College 1893-96. He became professor of transportation and commerce at the University of Pennsylvania in 1896, and was dean of its Wharton School from 1919 to 1933.[1] He served as expert on transportation (1899) on the United States Industrial Commission, and was a member on valuation of railway property for the United States Census Bureau (1904–05), and as expert on traffic on the National Waterways Commission of 1909. In 1911 he furnished a report on Panama Canal traffic, etc., for U.S. President William Howard Taft, and in 1907 arbitrated the dispute between the Southern Pacific Company and the Order of Railroad Telegraphers. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1915.[2] In 1926 he travelled to China; in Shandong he met the 6-year-old Duke Yansheng Kung Te-cheng and invited him to attend the University of Pennsylvania.[3] He was director of the Bureau of Municipal Research, Philadelphia, and director of the Philadelphia Maritime Exchange. He died in Philadelphia on March 8, 1950.[4]
He wrote many papers on the economics of railroads, etc. He was editor of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science from 1901 to 1914.