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Faculty and Staff
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Faculty
Staff
Donald Boudreaux
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
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
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
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
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 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
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