Faculty
Staff
Retired / Past Faculty and Staff
Faculty
James Buchanan
James Buchanan
and Yong Yoon are working on a prospective
Public Choice
paper that
clarifies the nature of the
alternatives that are necessarily confronted in any collective process. Drs.
Buchanan and Yoon delayed work on
The Extent of the Market
due to a shift
of attention and interest to questions about economists’ failure to predict
or explain the Great Recession. They are returning to the project in 2012.
Dr. Buchanan
still travels and speaks at events such as The Summer Institute for History
of Economics in Richmond, VA. He also gave presentations in Charlottesville,
Fairfax, and Washington, DC. The papers presented at the 2010 Academic
Conference in Honor of James M. Buchanan by the Fund for the Study of
Spontaneous Order and Atlas Economic Research Foundation, were published
this year in a special issue of
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.
Donald
Boudreaux completed a successful tenure as the Center’s director in the fall
of 2011. During that time he resumed his decades-long affiliation with the
Public Choice Outreach Conference. He finished a book of letters-to
the-editor, which contains pieces that aim to explain either a basic
principle of economics or a relevant fact of economic history. It will
published in June of 2012. In addition, he continued his twice-monthly
column for the
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review,
and a column
for the monthly magazine
President & CEO.
The blog he
writes with
Dr.
Russell Roberts, Café Hayek, can be found at
www.cafehayek.com.
Bryan Caplan
had an extraordinary year. His new book,
Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids (Basic Books, 2011)
enjoyed
global attention and glowing reviews. He appeared on FoxNews, MSNBC, the
BBC, NPR, and Freakonomics Radio, and was profiled by the
New York Times,
Yahoo!,
the Atlantic,
Globe and Mail,
and
The Times of London.
He discussed
his research on WSJ.com and Freakonomics, and debated “Tiger Mom” Amy Chua
for
The Guardian.
Dr. Caplan
completed his article on “systematically biased beliefs about political
influence” with Eric Crampton, Wayne Grove, and Ilya Somin. This piece is
now under submission at the
Journal of Politics.
His next major
project
is a third book,
The Case Against Education.
It argues that
the neglected signaling model of education explains most
of what goes on in classrooms around the world – and that, contrary to
popular and academic belief, the externalities of education are therefore
largely negative. To a large extent, the “return to education” reflects
rent-seeking rather than genuine creation of human capital. Dr. Caplan’s
book argues that government support for education primarily rests not on
interest-group politics, but on popular neglect of the negative
externalities of education. In keeping with the thesis of his new book, Dr.
Caplan and his wife are expecting their fourth child in April 2012.
 Tyler
Cowen published his book
The Great Stagnation: How America Ate all the Low-Hanging
Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better
with
Penguin/Dutton.
This book represents his vision for macroeconomics, asks whether innovation
has stagnated, and it interprets the past history of U.S. growth and looks
at where the country is headed. Within the first week of release it was
written up by
The Economist,
the
New York Times, The Washington
Post,
and numerous other outlets. It has been called “the most
debated non-fiction book of the year” and it was a
New York Times
bestseller.
In 2011, Dr.
Cowen was named one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers by
Foreign Policy
magazine. A
feature story in Bloomberg Businessweek called him “America’s Hottest
Economist,” and a poll from
The Economist
rated him as
one of the most influential economists of the decade.
Dr. Cowen and
his co-author, Alex Tabarrok, published revised editions of their
macroeconomics and microeconomics textbooks
Modern Principles: Macroeconomics and Modern Principles:
Microeconomics.
Dr. Cowen
completed work on his next book, called
An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies,
which will be published in April of 2012. He also continued to work on his
manuscript on the case for a free society. His current project is a “sequel”
to
The Great Stagnation,
which will focus on how economic growth and technological progress will
resume in America, the importance of artificial intelligence for our future,
and the forthcoming evolution of labor markets.
He also wrote
for numerous media outlets. He continued his monthly columns for
The New York Times
on economic
policy, wrote for
the
Times
on-line, for
Capital
magazine in
Spain, and he was also a contributor to
The Economist
online.
He started an economics of sports column at
Grantland.com
with Kevin Grier and started a weekly book review column for
The New York Times
Sunday
Magazine. He and Alex Tabarrok continued their daily weblog Marginal
Revolution, which now has over forty-six million unique visits and was named
the top economics blog by
the
Wall Street Journal.
 Robin
Hanson put together a team that won a bid on a prediction-market related
program sponsored by IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects
Activity) in the spring of 2011. The team’s first year of funding of the
$2.2 million started flowing in the summer. The program is expected to
continue for four years.
Dr. Hanson
also gave eleven academic presentations, had eight media mentions, and wrote
hundreds of posts at his blog at
overcomingbias.com.
He continued to use the freedom that academic tenure offers to focus on his
risky long-term intellectual project: developing an integrated “man the sly
rule bender” or “homo hypocritus” view that much of modern human behavior
can be usefully understood by evolved capacities and human beings’
tendencies to believe they do one thing while they really do another. He has
begun a book on this topic.
He taught a
law and economics course in the fall semester. He also taught environmental
economics, where for the first time in many years he tried to tie in
futurism elements, which produced mixed results at best! For the spring
semester, Dr. Hanson taught health econ and graduate industrial
organization.
In addition to
serving on the Individual Organization Preliminary exam committee, Robin
supervised Ph.D. research by Ken Lee, who completed an excellent thesis on
health economics.
Ronald A. Heiner
 Ronald
Heiner continued his work on the evolution of cooperation in one-shot
prisoners’ dilemmas. His analysis incorporates communication and signaling
costs, and demonstrates how contingent cooperators can maintain their
competitive advantage even if they can forecast their partner’s behavior no
better than pure chance.
He is
currently writing a book for the World Scientific Press, titled
Cooperation in Prisoners’ Dilemmas: the Critical Case of
One-Shot Interactions.
The book
analyzes the causal basis for analyzing behavior in strategic game theory
settings. This includes using signals to forecast a partner’s future
decisions, showing that it rests on the same causal basis used to forecast
events in the natural sciences — analogous to forecasting weather with
barometer signals that are caused by changes in atmospheric pressure that
also causally influence how much rain versus sunshine will happen.
Dr. Heiner
wrote two related papers for journals. The first generalizes earlier
expected utility axioms by Savage and Fishburn. The new axioms allow past
events to causally influence a decision maker’s preferences and beliefs;
enabling one to prove that rational behavior is fully consistent with
cooperating in one-shot prisoners’ dilemmas. The second paper uses graph
theory mathematics to extend game tree diagrams to a more general form,
called a causal network.”
 Noel
Johnson completed work on two papers in 2011. The first, “Trust Games: A
Meta- Analysis” with Alex Mislin will be published in the
Journal of Economic Psychology.
The other,
“How Much Should We Trust the World Values Survey Trust Question?” also with
Alex Mislin, is forthcoming in
Economics Letters.
Dr. Johnson
has also been busy writing and presenting papers. In October he presented a
paper he wrote with Mark Koyama entitled, “Taxes, Lawyers, and the Decline:
Trade Taxes and Terror of Witch Trials in France” at Harvard University. He
also presented this paper at the Osher Lifelong learning center. In the
spring, he presented a paper he co-authored with John Nye and Raphael Franck
entitled “Trade, Taxes, and Terroir” at the Cliometric Society Meetings and
the International Society for New Institutional Economics (ISNIE). Along
with Matthew Mitchell and Steve Yamarik, he completed a working paper
version of “Pick Your Poison: Do Politicians Regulate When They Can't
Spend?” which he also presented at ISNIE.
Dr. Johnson
also presented a paper co-authored with CSPC colleagues John Nye and Mark
Koyama entitled “Establishing a New Order: The Growth of the State and the
Decline of Witch Trials in France” at a Festschrift in honor of Joel Mokyr
at Northwestern in June. This essay will be published as a chapter in an
edited volume published by Princeton University Press.
In addition to
his research, he enjoyed organizing the Public Choice Seminar with his
colleagues
Garett Jones
and John Nye.
 Garett
Jones is the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus
Center, associate editor of the
New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics,
and a member
of the editorial board for the
Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics.
In 2011, he
presented his research into positive spillovers from IQ at the Asian
Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Econometric
Society meetings in St. Louis and Seoul, the Association of Private
Enterprise Education, and the Public Choice Society meetings.
This year, Dr.
Jones published an article in the
Asian Development Review
entitled
“National IQ and National Productivity: The Hive Mind Across Asia.” He also
published an article in the
New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics
entitled “IQ
and National Productivity.” He had an article accepted for publication in
Economic Systems
on national IQ and technology diffusion. Also, he and colleague Tim Kane had
an article accepted by the
Journal of Defense and Peace
Economics on
U.S. troop presence as a predictor of higher economic growth. In addition,
his article on the long-run fiscal situation of the United States was
accepted by the
Econ Journal Watch.
His survey and
interview research with Daniel Rothschild into the 2009 stimulus package was
the subject of an editorial in the
Wall Street Journal,
noted in a column by George Will, and widely discussed in the media. His
television and print media appearances included C-Span, Fox Business,
The New York Times, and Bloomberg Businessweek.
Dr. Jones also
served as co-host for the Public Choice Center's weekly seminar series.
Mark Koyama
 Mark Koyama
joined George Mason University and the
Center from the University of York in August 2011.
Throughout 2011, Dr. Koyama continued to
pursue his research program in economic history,
political economy, and the economics of religion. In the
spring he was invited to present his joint paper with
Jean-Paul Carvalho on the emergence of Reform and
ultra-Orthodox Judaism at the PPE workshop at George
Mason and at ASREC in Washington, DC. The paper is
currently under review.
He and Dr. Carvalho have begun work on
two new papers that explore the relationship between
modernity and religious and cultural polarization. Dr.
Koyama also continued work on a project exploring
private order legal institutions. In June, he was
invited to present his paper “Prosecution Associations
in Industrial Revolution England: Private Providers of
Public Goods?” at ISNIE 2011 at Stanford; this was a
prize for winning the best paper award at ISNIE 2010.
This paper is forthcoming in the
Journal of Legal Studies
in January 2012.
In April, Dr. Koyama began new research
on the rise of the state and the decline in witchcraft
trials in early modern France. Together with Noel
Johnson and John Nye, he wrote a broad outline paper on
this subject for Joel Mokyr’s Festschrift. He and Dr.
Johnson completed a more detailed research paper
exploring the role placed by the tax state in the
decline of witch trials econometrically in October, and
he presented this at the London School of Economics in
June and at the Southern Economic Association Meetings
in Washington D.C. in November. The paper garnered a
great deal of attention and was featured in various
blogs. He and Dr. Johnson have since begun a new project
on tax farming in early modern England and France. In
July, he completed a paper with Chris Briggs on medieval
credit markets which is currently a revise and resubmit
at the
Journal of Economic History.
Finally, Dr. Koyama was also part of a
roundtable discussion on litigation and the use of the
courts in medieval England at the World Medieval
Congress in Leeds.
 David
Levy and his co-author Sandra Peart continued work on their expert project.
After many years of hard work, they were pleased to see the “Soviet growth”
article published with full color prints in the
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
The article
discussed the fact that Soviet – American growth comparisons became
important in textbooks just at the moment that publishers were moving to
color printing. Reproducing the graphs in color helps preserve that memory
and perhaps captures some of the impact.
Drs. Levy and
Peart also had a spinoff of the textbook project accepted for publication in
the Research in the History of Economic Thought & Methodology
archival series. While it is common
knowledge that Rose Wilder Lane’s review of Lorie Tarshis’s textbook in
Merwin K. Hart’s
Economic Council Review
began years of
controversy, they discovered that Lane couldn’t distinguish between Ludwig
von Mises’s
political views and those of Lorie Tarshis since they were both democrats of
a majoritarian variety. They then collected the von Mises – Lane
correspondence, some correspondence between Watts and von Mises, and some
records of the Hart – Lane campaign to remove Tarshis’s book from college
classrooms to describe a debate between liberals, either of a Tarshis or von
Mises variety, and those who called themselves individualists.
John
Nye
 John
Nye was on sabbatical in the first half of 2011, and had a very busy summer.
He spoke at a conference in Manila, for the Asian Development Bank, and his
paper was subsequently published as the lead article in the
Asian Development Review.
He also met
with new Philippine President Benigno Aquino III for a private discussion of
economic policy.
He then spent
time at the Stanford Center for International Development where he presented
several papers, including work with Noel Johnson on the demographic
significance of Asian superstitions entitled, “Does Fortune Favor Dragons?”
This paper subsequently appeared in print in the
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
With Desiree
Desierto,
he published an article entitled “The Evolution of Institutions: The Medium,
the Long, and the Ultra-Long Run” which will appear in the
Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics.
Another
joint article with Prof. Desierto,
“Why Do Weak States Prefer Prohibition to Taxation?” appeared in
The Political Economy of Institutions
(Elsevier,
2011).
Dr. Nye also
began research on education and human capital with the Higher School of
Economics in Moscow, where he serves as a Research Director. His group is
taking advantage of an unusually large survey of Russian students at the
university to look at the links between college performance and high school
test scores and also prenatal exposure to testosterone as measured by the
second to fourth digit ratios.
Over the
summer, he served as a lecturer at the Ronald Coase Institute 2011 workshop
at the University of Chicago. In June, he flew to Northwestern for a
conference that he helped to organize in honor of Professor Joel Mokyr. Dr.
Nye will edit a volume drawn from the conference papers to be published by
Princeton University Press.
He also
continued his research in Moscow, where he lectured at the RSSIA workshop.
In the Philippines, he gave numerous talks on development policy at the
Philippine Central Bank, Asia United Bank, and Bank of Commerce. His work
was featured in half a dozen newspaper articles in Manila. Dr. Nye also did
work for the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, and the Department of
Agrarian Reform.
Dr. Nye
returned to GMU in the Fall and continued his research on economic history,
experimental economics,education, and institutions. He was an invited
speaker at the LACEA meetings of the Latin American Econometric Society on a
panel with Deirdre McCloskey and Jeffrey Williamson. He also served on the
International Advisory Council for the Higher School of Economics in Moscow
in November. He finished the year giving another talk on Institutions and
Inequality for the Asian Development Bank.
Additionally, Dr. Nye’s paper on the eighteenth century
British beer industry appeared in
The Economics of Beer
(Oxford, 2011)
which was chosen as a holiday book recommendation by
The New York Times.
Ilia Rainer
Ilia
 Rainer
had a productive year in 2011. He received a revise and resubmit from the
American Political Science
Review for the
paper he wrote with Raphael Franck entitled, “Does the Leader’s Ethnicity
Matter? Ethnic Favoritism, Education and Health in Sub-Saharan Africa,”
which he recently resubmitted. Using data from 18 African countries, the
paper shows that the ordinary members of African ethnic groups received
substantial education and health benefits from having a co-ethnic leader in
power.
Professor
Rainer has also completed a new draft of his paper, “Do Black Mayors Improve
Black Employment Outcomes? Evidence from Large U.S. Cities,” which he wrote
with John Nye and Thomas Stratmann. He has been invited to present it at
several conferences. The paper shows that black employment and income rise
during the tenure of black mayors both in absolute terms and relative to
whites. This increase in black employment is particularly pronounced in
municipal government, but occurs in the private sector as well. The paper
has been recently submitted to the
Journal of Public Economics.
Dr. Rainer has
also made significant progress in his and Francesco Trebbi’s ambitious
effort to construct a new dataset on ethnicity of ministers in a large
number of countries of Sub-Saharan Africa between 1960 and 2004. In 2011, he
was awarded a $110K grant by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada in support of this project. Based on the completed dataset
for fifteen countries, he prepared the first draft of his paper “How is
Power Shared in Africa?” and presented it at the NBER conference in
Zanzibar. The paper shows that the African governments display a surprising
degree of ethnic inclusiveness and proportionality even in periods of
autocracy.
 Thomas
Stratmann
is working on several projects in the field of experimental
public choice. He is analyzing how voters react in their voting decisions
when they know there is a chance that the candidate issued deceptive
campaign advertisements. Also, he is studying the effect of broken election
promises by incumbents on voter turnout and voter decisions for whom to cast
a ballot. In this research area, Dr. Stratmann, together with Dan Houser and
Rebecca Morton have published an article in the
European Journal of Political Economy.
Drs. Stratmann
and Houser have also written a forthcoming paper in
Public Choice,
which shows how Gordon Tullock influenced the current thinking in
experimental economics.
Further, in
the field of law and economics Dr. Stratmann finished a forthcoming paper in
the
Journal of Law and Economics
which shows
the effectiveness of traffic law enforcement on the reduction in car
accidents. He continues his work in other areas of applied microeconomics as
shown by this year's publications in the
Journal of Health Economics, Social Science and Medicine,
the
American Journal of Law and Economics,
and the
American Law and Economics Review.
 Alex Tabarrok
is the new
director of the Center for Study of Public Choice, the Bartley J. Madden
Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center and the director of research for
The Independent Institute.
Dr. Tabarrok
recently published his book,
Launching the Innovation Renaissance
with TED
books.
Launching the Innovation Renaissance
is, in the
words of one reviewer, “a crisp and thought provoking” look at innovation
and patents, prizes, regulation, education and what we need to do to
increase innovation for the long run. Also appearing this year is the second
edition of
Modern Principles,
his principles of economics textbook with Tyler Cowen.
Dr. Tabarrok
continues to make many media appearances, including a television appearance
on John Stossel's show, NPR, Radio Rounds and Freakonomics radio. He was
also one of the featured experts in a
Time
magazine
special on the debt debate. His work was also in
the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic,
and
The Economist
and it was quoted in
The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Christian
Science Monitor, Slate
and many other
newspapers and magazines.
Marginal
Revolution,
his blog with Tyler Cowen, continues to be one of the top 100 blogs in the
world, according to Technorati.
The Wall Street Journal
ranked
Marginal Revolution as one of the top economics blogs, stating: "Marginal
Revolution is like nipping into a world-class local bar, where the drinks
are always perfectly mixed, the atmosphere is relaxed and civilized, while
intelligent conversation and serendipity are available on tap.”
 Yong Yoon
worked
on two research projects in 2011. One was on the
Extent of Markets,
a
joint project with James M. Buchanan, and the other was on
Collective Action,
also a joint
project with Dr. Buchanan. As a spinoff of the first project, he published
his article, “Science, Scientific Institution, and Economic Progress” in
Institutional Economics and National Competitiveness.
In this
article, Dr. Yoon applied Adam Smith’s theory of economic progress to
demography and to explain the decline of technologies in Tasmania.
He has also
presented seminars based on his draft “Language and Economic Progress” at
Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea. He also presented this paper at the
Osher Lifelong Learning Center in September. In this paper, he attempted to
explain the sophistication of language by Adam Smith’s principle of economic
progress.
Staff
Jo Ann Burgess
 Jo
Ann Burgess began work for two major projects in 2011: the first was for
the 2012 celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of
The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of
Constitutional Democracy
by James
M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. She also prepared for the 2012 Public
Choice Society’s second world congress of all public choice societies.
In her daily
duties, Jo Ann is 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 would also
like to take this time to thank Cambridge, Liberty Fund, and Springer for
their generous contributions at the conclusion of the Public Choice Society
meetings to our small, but select, center library.
Lisa Hill-Corley
 Lisa Hill-Corley
was glad
to be a part of the very able admin team along with Jane and Jo Ann. She
assists with the support of the main resident faculty at Carow Hall with
administrative, visitor and office manager tasks. She also coordinates
the main budget and grants for Center along with several research grants
for individual professors.
Lisa returned
to the Mason Inn in August of 2011 to coordinate another successful Outreach
Conference, which welcomed twenty-five participants from all over the
country.
She continues
to work
on the website for the center, as well as helping the admin team coordinate
the foreign national visitors for programs throughout the year. She is also
a Mason graduate student—she
is beginning her thesis work in the Masters in
Fine Arts program for Creative Writing.
Jane Perry
 Jane
Perry continues to share duties of providing resident faculty support and
responsibilities
for the daily admin operations and management of Carow Hall as a member of
the CSPC administrative team. She enjoys welcoming faculty, students,
visiting scholars and other visitors to Carow Hall. Jane also serves as the
staff administrative and
logistical
coordinator for each of the weekly Public Choice Seminar Series
presentations.
Throughout the
year, Jane’s proofreading skills continued to be in demand on numerous
projects, including a number of professional journal articles authored by
Center faculty.
In December
2011, Jane celebrated a milestone 5 years at GMU and the Center for Study of
Public Choice! As always, she enjoys working with her talented admin team
colleagues Lisa Hill-Corley and Jo Ann Burgess on various projects and
events, including the highly popular 2011 Outreach Conference. And she’s
looking forward to another exciting year at the Center in 2012!
Retired Faculty and Staff
Betty Tillman, ret.
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.
Gordon Tullock, ret.
On November 21, 2008, 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.
Janet Byrd 1951-2006
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