Over a long and distinguished career, Oral “Jug” Capps, Jr. has been at the forefront of research on consumer demand issues, applied econometrics, theoretical and practical approaches to the use of scanner data, food labeling, impacts of health and nutrition on consumer behavior, and evaluation of the effectiveness of commodity advertising and promotion programs. He has been the person responsible for the assessment of the effectiveness of the dairy promotion programs since 2011. His research approach is a rigorous blend of theory-based econometric methodology and applications. Dr. Capps laid the foundation for the now ubiquitous data-intensive and theory-based food demand research approaches. His body of work has been highly cited, and has been professionally awarded for research, teaching, mentoring, graduate student supervision, private sector partnerships, and professional service. He has published ground-breaking work concerning uses of scanner-derived information for managerial decision-making in food retailing; the analysis of expenditure patterns of pre-prepared foods and foods eaten away from home; the analysis of the food demand impacts of health and nutrition information; the unilateral price effects of mergers and acquisitions; and the evaluation of generic commodity advertising and promotion programs. His moniker is “an academician with a corporate mentality.”

Currently Executive Professor, Regents Professor and holder of the Southwest Dairy Marketing Endowed Chair in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Texas A&M University as well as Director of the Agribusiness, Food, and Consumer Economics Research Center (AFCERC), Dr. Capps was educated at Virginia Tech. He earned a B.S. degree in Mathematics in 1975, a M.S. degree in Agricultural Economics in 1977, a second M.S. degree in Statistics in 1979, and a Ph.D. degree in Agricultural Economics in December 1979. He has authored 173 refereed journal articles and authored/co-authored six books. In July 2024, Dr. Capps was bestowed the title of Fellow by the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA).

According to RePEc/IDEAS rankings released in July 2025, based on the number of citations, Dr. Capps ranks in the top 5% out of 71,569 economists globally. In terms of the number of distinct research works and the number of published journal pages, Dr. Capps ranks in the top 1%.

Dr. Capps is Co-Founder (in 2001), Chief Economist, and Managing Partner of Forecasting and Business Analytics. LLC (FABA), a consulting firm specializing in the use of quantitative methods to address economic problems. Dr. Capps currently lives in College Station, Texas. He is an avid Major League Baseball fan, particularly of the Baltimore Orioles. Finally, Dr. Capps is a survivor of the San Francisco earthquake on October 17, 1989, and a survivor of the terrorist attack on the New York World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.