Faculty
Staff
Donald Boudreaux
 Donald
J. Boudreaux
is serving his last year as Chairman of the GMU Economics
Department. He continues to write a twice-monthly column for the
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
under the title “Donald J. Boudreaux’s Economics in Many Lessons.”
He also
blogs with GMU colleague Russell Roberts at
Café Hayek
(www.cafehayek.com)
and with University of Illinois law professor Andrew Morriss on
Market Correction
(http://marketcorrection.powerblogs.com). Finally, he continues to
serve as Director of the Public Choice Center and the annual Public
Choice Outreach Seminar.
James Buchanan
Dr. James Buchanan
published the book
The
Power to Tax: Analytic Foundations of a Fiscal Constitution
with Geoffrey Brennan at Cambridge University Press. He also published a
paper entitled “Let Us Understand Adam Smith,” in the
Journal of the History of Economic Thought.
Dr. Buchanan’s article with Yong J. Yoon, “Public Choice and the Extent of
the Market,” was published in
Kyklos.
He was the subject of two
papers: “Discussion, Construction, and Evolution: Mill, Buchanan and Hayek
on the Constitutional Order,” by Sandra Peart and David Levy in
Constitutional Political Economy;
and Jerry H. Tempelman’s
“James M. Buchanan on Public-Debt Finance,” in
Independent Review.
Dr. Buchanan also traveled
to GMU to attend the 2008 James M. Buchanan Lecture.
Bryan Caplan
 Bryan Caplan
enjoyed another
very successful year. His book,
The
Myth of the Rational Voter,
has sold over 13,000 copies and was named a Best Book of 2007 by the
Financial Times.
He also gave presentations at Yale, Harvard, the Collège de France, the
World Bank, UVA, and the National Economists Club. There was also a
plenary session on the book at the 2008 Public Choice Society meetings.
Princeton University Press has just released the paperback edition,
featuring a new reply to critics. An issue-length symposium on the book
is forthcoming in
Critical Review.
Dr. Caplan’s media
presence continues to expand. He has had op-eds in both
The
New York Times
and
The Washington Post,
as well as the cover story in the October issue of
Reason.
He also did many radio interviews and appeared on the Fox Business
Network show
Cavuto.
During this period, Dr.
Caplan also published widely in academic journals. He was particularly
pleased with the publication of "Behavioral Economics and Perverse
Effects of the Welfare State" in
Kyklos and
“Have the Experts Been Weighed, Measured, and Found Wanting?” in
Critical Review,
as well as the chapter on “The Totalitarian Threat” appearing in the
Bostrum/Ćirković volume on
Global Catastrophic Risks.
His next two big projects
are a series of empirical papers based on a new survey and a new book
called
Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.
During the last academic
year, he and his co-authors wrote and administered an original survey on
Perceptions of Political Responsibility. Zogby International administered
it to a random sample of Americans. With financial support from GMU
Economics, they gave the same survey to American politics specialists in the
APSA. They now have data from 1,215 members of the U.S. public and 673
political scientists that they intend to use to write series of articles.
Dr. Caplan will be the lead author on the first piece, tentatively titled
“Systematically Biased Beliefs About Political Responsibility?”
Last summer found Dr. Caplan
having to turn down an appearance on
Good
Morning America.
They wanted him to come and discuss his new book,
The Selfish Reason to Have More Kids,
which was actually just a blog post at the time. The experience got him
thinking that if a national television show was interested in a book that
didn’t even exist, it was time for him to write it! He decided to put a
prior book project on hold, and moved
Selfish
Reasons up to
the top of his queue. Since then he has written a book proposal, the
preface, and chapter one. His agent is now shopping this package around to
publishers.
And just to prove his point,
he and his wife are expecting a new little member of the Caplan family in
2009!
Roger D. Congleton
 Roger D. Congleton
had a very active
2008. He finished up a number of ongoing research projects, started
several new papers, and gave a variety of talks at universities and
research centers in Europe. The highlight of the year was the
publication of an extensive two-volume collection of the best articles
on the theory and application of rent seeking entitled
40
Years of Rent Seeking Research,
edited with Kai Konrad and Arye Hillman. The collection includes nearly
a hundred articles, many of which are not widely available at libraries.
In addition to the rent
seeking volumes he continued work on
Perfecting Parliament: Constitutional Reform, Liberalism, and the Rise of
Western Democracy.
Prepublication copies of the book manuscript have been circulated to
colleagues in the US, Europe, and Japan. The comments and suggestions will
be incorporated in early 2009, and the manuscript is expected to be sent off
for publication shortly thereafter.
Dr. Congleton had several
papers accepted for publication and found their way into print during the
year, including a paper with Sang Hack Lee on the creation of monopolies by
states as a source of revenue, which will be forthcoming in the
European Journal of Political Economy.
He has also authored a paper on the moral interests of voters, which is
forthcoming in the
Journal
of Public Finance and Public Choice,
and a historical paper on the constitutional connections between the old
Dutch republic and the United States that was recently published in
Constitutional Political Economy.
He also wrote several new pieces during the year, including papers on the
expansion of the welfare state after WWII with Feler Bose, and one on voter
interest in the competence of elected officials with Yongjing Zhang.
In addition to writing and
teaching, Dr. Congleton presented several papers at universities, research
institutes and at academic meetings in Switzerland, Germany and the
Netherlands. He continues to serve on the editorial boards of
Public
Choice, European Journal of Political Economy, Review of International
Organization
and two smaller international journals focused on Public Choice topics.
Copies of Dr. Congleton’s
forthcoming and recently published papers are available at
http://rdc1.net/forthcoming/index.htm.
Tyler Cowen
 Tyler Cowen
continued work on
his textbook with Alex Tabarrok, which is due for a 2009 publication by
Freeman Worth Publishers, the leading textbook company in the world. It
will be part of a line of textbooks along with Steve Levitt, Paul
Krugman, and others. Both micro and macro volumes will be available and
the book will present an example-oriented, intuitive approach to how to
think like an economist. The book also will offer more coverage of
public choice topics and issues than its competitors.
His book
Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive
Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist,
came out in several language editions, including Italian, Chinese,
Korean, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Dr. Cowen wrote for
numerous media outlets in 2008. He continued his columns for
The New York Times
on economic policy, wrote for Forbes.com, wrote for Slate.com, wrote a
regular column for
Capital
magazine in Spain, and started a new column for
Money
magazine. He and Alex Tabarrok continue to write the daily weblog
Marginal Revolution (www.marginalrevolution.com), which now has over
eighteen million unique visits.
He
currently has three finished but dormant book manuscripts; one on
neuroeconomics and neurodiversity, one on the economics of food, and one on
the philosophical foundations.
Click
here for pictures from Tyler Cowen and Alex
Tabarrok's book launch.
Robin Hanson
Dr.
Hanson continued to lead the growing field of prediction markets in 2008. He
published four related articles during the year and provided assistance to a
commercial venture to implement his combinatorial market technology. He
also published three articles on health policy and four articles on the
social implications of future technologies, which focused in particular on
the implications of whole brain emulations. Dr. Hanson continues to write
his blog, Overcoming Bias (http://robinhanson.typepad.com/overcomingbias)
which focuses on future tech issues. Overcoming Bias now averages over five
thousand readers a day, which is two thousand more since last year.
Ronald A. Heiner
Dr. Heiner continued his
research on contingent cooperation in prisoner’s dilemma settings, including
one-shot games. Most recently, he has began focusing on information costs;
realizing that contingent cooperators will look for symptoms of lying by
always defect players, and cooperate only by default – when such symptoms
are not detected.
He currently has several
papers under journal review. These include, “Robust Contingent Cooperation
Even in Pure One-Shot Prisoner’s Dilemmas,” which develops the recent
analysis with information costs using the LDD detection strategy, “Robust
Evolution of Contingent Cooperators in One-Shot Prisoners’ Dilemmas,” which
presents the mathematical analysis needed to derive the results in the first
paper; “Extending Game Trees to Causal Networks,” which uses graph theory
mathematics to extend the game tree diagrams to a more general form, called
a causal network; and “Expected Utility & Subjective Probability Axioms for
N-Player Causal Games,” which generalizes earlier expected utility axioms by
Savage and Fishburn, thereby allowing past events to causally influence a
decision maker’s preferences and beliefs.
Dr. Heiner is also writing a
book,
Evolution and Rationality of Contingent Cooperation,
which gives a systematic presentation of results developed in journal
papers, including the impact of communication costs.
Laurence R. Iannaccone
Professor Iannaccone
continues to advance the economics of religion through a wide range of
initiatives. He published three articles, had a fourth accepted,
completed several co-authored papers, and lectured at many conferences,
universities, and government agencies. His first publication summarized
progress in the economic analysis of religion. The other two, which
concerned religious extremism and suicide bombing, led to presentations at
the CIA, FBI, and other intelligence agencies. The forthcoming article,
co-authored with Michael Makowsky, provides a new simulation framework for
the study of religious commitment, conversion, and sect formation. Among
his work in progress are two books, an article on the Delphic Oracle, a
study of fertility decline among European Catholics, empirical work on
long run religious trends, and a survey on religion versus science.
With the help of major
grants from the Metanexus Institute, Templeton Foundation, and National
Science Foundation, Iannaccone’s Center for the Economic Study of Religion
acquired a small staff, launched twice-monthly interdisciplinary workshop,
hosted visiting scholars, and greatly expanded its research activities with
GMU-affiliated scholars and doctoral students. He also developed a new
two-semester course sequence and advanced graduate seminar, which make it
possible for our PhD students to officially specialize in the study of
religion and economics – a first at any major university.
Garett Jones
 Garett Jones has
been exploring in his ongoing research into why cognitive skills, as
measured by standard test scores such as the SAT, appear to matter more for
groups than for individuals. During 2008 he published a paper in
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
finding that when repeated prisoner’s dilemma experiments are run at
high-SAT schools, students cooperate about 1/3 more often than students at
low-SAT schools. Jones hypothesizes that since productivity-sustaining
political and economic institutions demand informal cooperation, smarter
groups may build better firms, better political systems, and better informal
conflict resolution mechanisms.
In a paper
presented at the 2008 American Economic Association (AEA) meetings, he
developed a general equilibrium model that explored a different channel for
the apparent cognitive skill externality; he showed that some sectors of the
economy are heavily subject to increasing returns to skill while others are
not. This can explain why low-skilled workers earn much more after they
immigrate to high-skilled countries. In another paper presented at the AEA
meetings, Dr. Jones showed that national average IQ scores robustly predict a
nation’s technological progress, and he provided empirical evidence that
countries with sufficiently low cognitive skills are likely to end up in
poverty traps. At the same time, he showed that traditional education
measures are poor predictors of a nation’s technological progress.
Dr. Jones also
published papers this year in
Econ Journal Watch
and
Journal of International Money and Finance.
In two ongoing projects with psychologist W. Joel Schneider, he is
explaining how the alleged effect of socioeconomic status on IQ is largely a
statistical illusion, and how endogenous growth models can help explain the
rapid increase in human brain size over the last few millennia.
David Levy
Dr. Levy
had a big year with his
analytical egalitarianism (AE) project. The volume on the
“Peart-Levy hypothesis” came out in the book issue of the
American Journal of Economics and Sociology,
the only history of economics journal in JSTOR. Another project that came
out in 2008 was the collection of papers and conversations that he and
co-author Sandra Peart edited. Entitled
The Street Porter and the Philosopher,
the
collection includes work
from the first five years of their Summer Institute
conference. They were enormously pleased to have in the appendix the
correspondence of James Buchanan and John Rawls, who occupy rather different
points in policy space. One of the central tenants of AE is that the
motivational model that Drs. Levy and Peart used should to be applied to the
model builder.
Their
piece on George Stigler for
Palgraves
discusses the many successes and an odd failure by one of the moving forces
in the revival of the AE. During a symposium on econometrics and ethics at
the Eastern Economic Association that they organized, the technical paper
they presented worked through how one might deal with sympathetic bias.
They also contributed another technical piece on sympathetic bias to
Statistical Methods in Medical Research.
Dr. Levy
and his co-author also organized another successful Summer Institute for the
Preservation of the History of Economics, handling every aspect from raising
the money to ordering the t-shirts. For 2008’s program they were fortunate
to have James Buchanan talk about Rawls on the Rawls day and to have a day
devoted to Warren Nutter.
Dr. Levy
also signed one of the contending letters from economists on the bailout and
wrote an on-line piece with Dr. Peart entitled “An expert-induced bubble.”
As a result, he was asked to come to talk to some members of the House of
Representatives on very short notice.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
of
October 10 has the amusing details. He has also been encouraged to organize
a meeting on the Constitution and the economic crisis at Dr. Peart’s campus,
the University of Richmond.
John Nye
John Nye published a number of papers in economic history and
institutional economics in 2008. His paper with Charles Moul on cheating in
tournament chess, “Did the Soviets Collude?: A Statistical Analysis of
Championship Chess 1940-78,” addressed one of the longest standing issues in
the history of the sport, and was accepted for publication in the
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
His article “The Political Economy of Anglo-French Trade
1689-1899,”
which is
a follow-up to 2007’s
War, Wine, and Taxes,
is forthcoming in a World Bank volume on agricultural trade distortions
edited by Kym Anderson. His piece “The Pigou Problem,” which questioned the
conventional wisdom on the desirability of further gasoline taxes, appeared
in
Regulation
magazine over the summer. His paper entitled “Institutions and the
Institutional Environment” recently appeared as a chapter in the newly
published
Guidebook to the New Institutional Economics
from Cambridge University Press. His article “Standards of Living and
Modern Economic Growth” appeared in the revised 4th edition of the
Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
Dr. Nye had various reviews and shorter pieces appear in different outlets
and he was also interviewed in the press and on the Web about his recent
research.
In addition he has begun a number of new diverse projects
this year, including studies of the economic history of the Philippines, a
new model of institutional change, the impact of cultural preferences for
birth years on college education, the decline of alcohol taxes in nineteenth
century France, the impact of Black mayors on unemployment, the problem of
elite reform, and the effect of market experience on cooperation and trust.
Many of the projects are in collaboration with colleagues at GMU such as
Noel Johnson, Ilia Rainer, Thomas Stratmann, and Omar Al-Ubaydli. He
continued to work with the Ronald Coase Institute to train scholars to
pursue research in the New Institutional Economics and he also lectured
extensively in Sao Paulo and Paris.
Ilia Rainer
Ilia Rainer had another productive year. He completed the
draft of his paper “Does the Leader’s Ethnicity Matter? Ethnic Favoritism,
Education and Health in Sub-Saharan Africa” with Raphael Franck and
presented it at Harvard University and at the New Economic School in Moscow.
Using data from 18 African countries, Dr. Rainer studies how
primary education and infant mortality of ethnic groups were affected by
changes in the ethnicity of the countries’ leaders during the last 50 years.
The paper provides first systematic evidence of ethnic favoritism in
Sub-Saharan Africa.
He has also been working on a new paper tentatively titled
“Do Black Mayors Improve Black Employment Outcomes? Evidence from the U.S.
Cities” with John Nye and Thomas Stratmann. The preliminary empirical
results suggest that Black mayors indeed improve Black employment outcomes,
and that this effect is particularly strong in cities with a large share of
Black population.
Dr. Rainer has also started an ambitious data collection
effort, putting together a new dataset on ethnicity of ministers in more
than 20 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa between 1960 and 2004. He is
planning to use these data to study patterns of ethnic favoritism in African
politics.
Thomas Stratmann
Thomas Stratmann continued to work together with the
experimental group at ICES to develop a research program in experimental
public choice. GMU, with its strength in Public Choice and experimental
economics, is in a unique position to advance this research agenda.
To date this collaborative effort has resulted in four
research papers covering topics of voter turnout, vote choices, candidate
advertising, and welfare in elections. In particular, the colleagues are
examining the effect of deceptive advertising in politics on vote choices
and the election of candidates. This exciting research project is drawing
graduate students who are writing dissertations in this area. He is also
working on campaign advertising using field data and his research has
resulted in recently published papers such as “Political Contribution Caps
and Lobby Formation: Theory and Evidence” in the
Journal of Public Economics
with Allan Drazen and Nuno Limão and “Contribution Limits and the
Effectiveness of Campaign Spending” in
Public Choice.
Professor Stratmann’s research interests include
international political economy. In this area he analyzes emerging market
economies and the impact of their fiscal policy and political institutions
on the interest rate these economies are charged for foreign debt. This
research resulted in a co-authored paper with IMF staffer Bernardin Akitoby
which was published in the November 2008 issue of
Economic Journal.
Professor Stratmann also explored the nexus between law, economics, and
health in several papers published jointly with Jon Klick. These papers are
“Medical Malpractice Reform and Physicians in High Risk Specialties” in the
Journal of Legal Studies,
“Diabetes Treatments and Moral Hazard” in the
Journal of Law and Economics
and “Abortion Access and Risky Sex Among Teens: Parental Involvement Laws
and Sexually Transmitted Diseases” in the
Journal of Law, Economics and Organization.
Alexander Tabarrok
Alexander
Tabarrok
is the Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the
Mercatus Center at George Mason University and director of research for
The Independent Institute. He is also the co-author with Tyler Cowen of
the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution (www.marginalrevolution.com).
His recent research looks at bounty hunters, judicial
incentives and elections, crime control, patent reform, methods to
increase the supply of human organs for transplant and the regulation of
pharmaceuticals. He is the editor of the books
Entrepreneurial Economics: Bright Ideas from the Dismal
Science, The Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society and
Changing the Guard: Private Prisons and the Control of Crime.
His papers have appeared in the
Journal of Law and Economics, Public Choice, Economic
Inquiry, Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Theoretical Politics,
The American Law and Economics Review, Kyklos
and many other journals. Popular articles by Dr. Tabarrok have appeared
in
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal
and many other magazines and newspapers.
Click
here for pictures from Tyler Cowen and Alex
Tabarrok's book launch.
Gordon Tullock
On November 21, The Center joined the George Mason Law School
in honoring the distinguished career of Gordon Tullock with a retirement
celebration at the campus in Arlington. The event was attended by Center
faculty, staff and students, GMU president Alan Merten, and the Dean of the
College of Humanities and Social Sciences Jack Censer.
With
his retirement, Gordon moved from being a George Mason Law professor and
became a Professor Emeritus of Law. He moved to Tucson, Arizona with his
sister and brother-in-law.
Click
here for pictures of Gordon's
farewell at the GMU Law School.
Yong J. Yoon
Yong J. Yoon
continued his research program with James M. Buchanan on
the extent of the market and increasing returns. The analytical
innovation in this program has been “stochastic demand,” which describes
probabilistic (uncertain and infrequent) demand for some goods. As
derivatives from this program, he published four papers this year.
His co-authored paper with Jim Buchanan, “Public Choice
and the Extent of the Market” appeared in
Kyklos.
Another joint paper “Stochastic Demand: Another Smith Puzzle” was
accepted for inclusion in the
Elgar Companion to Adam Smith.
His paper “Stochastic Demand, Specialization, and Increasing Returns”
appeared in
Journal of Division of Labor and Transaction Costs.
A paper on income distribution, “Globalization and Internal and External
Inequality,” appeared in
The International Journal of Economic Policy Studies.
The paper is based on his plenary speech at the 2007 Japan Economic
Policy Association International Conference in Tokyo.
He also published an article on current issues entitled
“Obama and America’s Future” in the November 2008
Center for Free Enterprise.
In this Korean-language article he introduced Walter Williams’s column
“Getting Beyond Race.” With Ulrich Witt, he is arranging a conference
session on “New perspectives on demand theory” which extends the idea of
stochastic demand.
Jo Ann Burgess
Jo Ann Burgess
is a vital link and resource to the Center for Study of Public Choice.
She wears many hats and is irreplaceable as the Archivist/Librarian of
the Buchanan House collection of Buchanan’s papers, books and
memorabilia. In addition, she plays an important role as the Center’s
Visiting Scholar Facilitator in administering and coordinating with the
Office of International Programs and Services to secure appropriate
paperwork and forms required for the visiting scholars’ entrance into
the United States. She makes sure that the Center complies with U.S.
regulations and George Mason University’s procedures for international
visitors. In addition, on the arrival of the visitors, she arranges all
necessary paperwork and university authorizations for IDs and access to
the library for needed materials in conducting their research during
their visit.
Jo Ann also
serves as Administrator of the Public Choice Society in support of the
President. She is accountable for all day-to-day operations of the Public
Choice Society and is responsible for coordination of the annual meetings.
Lisa Hill-Corley
Lisa
Hill-Corley
assists with the support of the main resident faculty at
Carow Hall with administrative, visitors and office manager tasks. She
also coordinates the main budget and grants for Center along with
several research grants for individual professors. She is also the
coordinator for the Center’s summer programs, the Outreach Conference
and the Summer Institute.
Along with Jane Perry and her fine team of graduate student assistants Diana
Weinert, Michael Thomas, Kail Padgitt and Michael Makowsky, Lisa coordinated
the Ninth Annual Summer Institute for Drs. Levy and Peart and The Outreach
Program in October for Dr. Boudreaux.
She continues to design the Annual Reports and website for the center, as
well as helping the admin team coordinate the foreign national visitors for
programs throughout the year.
Lisa is glad to part of the very able admin team with Jane and Jo Ann and is
looking forward to being a part of Center activities in 2009!
Jane Perry
Jane Perry continues to
share duties of providing resident faculty support and responsibilities for
the daily operations and management of Carow Hall as a member of the Center
for Study of Public Choice administrative team.
Jane additionally provided
administrative and logistical support for each of the 24 weekly Public
Choice Seminar Series presentations for Professor Bryan Caplan. She also
again enjoyed assisting program coordinator Lisa Hill-Corley and other able
team members with general staff and administrative support for both the
Summer Institute and Outreach Conference.
She was able to put her
proofreading and editorial skills to continuous use on numerous projects
throughout the year.
Jane is especially very
grateful to her wonderful admin team colleagues Lisa and Jo Ann Burgess, as
well as all the helpful professors, students, former students and other
colleagues who make this such an outstanding place!
Betty Tillman
The
center bid farewell and good luck to longtime administrative director Betty
Tillman, who began working with Dr. Buchanan at UVa in 1961. Jo Ann Burgess
worked several months on the beautiful gala retirement and eightieth
birthday celebration, which was held at the Fairview Park Marriott on April
27. Over two hundred well-wishers from across the country and around the
world were there to mark this bittersweet occasion.
Click
here for pictures from Betty's
retirement / 80th birthday gala.
Janet Byrd 1951-2006
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