Faculty
Staff
Faculty
Donald Boudreaux
 Donald
J. Boudreaux is Chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason
University in Fairfax, Virginia. He's held this position since August
2001. Previously, he was president of the Foundation for Economic
Education (1997-2001); Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Economics
at Clemson University (1992-1997); and Assistant Professor of Economics at
George Mason University (1985-1989).
In 2007, Professor Donald
Boudreaux published his book
Globalization
(Greenwood Press). He continues to write a twice-monthly column for the
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
under the title “Donald J. Boudreaux’s Economics in Many Lessons.” During
the past year he also has contributed several op-eds to the
Christian Science Monitor
and the
Baltimore Sun. He
blogs with GMU colleague Russell Roberts at
Café
Hayek (www.cafehayek.com)
and with University of Illinois law professor Andrew Morriss at
Market
Correction (http://marketcorrection.powerblogs.com).
Finally, he continues to serve as Chairman of the Department of Economics at
GMU and as Director of the annual Public Choice Outreach Seminar.
James Buchanan
Dr.
Buchanan chose to become emeritus advisory general director this year. His
achievements began with the publication of
Economics from the Outside In: Better than Plowing and Beyond
and concluded with the inauguration of the Buchanan family reading room at
Middle Tennessee State University.
Economics from the Outside In: Better than Plowing and Beyond,
which is
the follow up to his original biography,
Better Than Plowing: And Other Personal Essays
reached
the index stage in early 2007. Since the new Texas A&M University Press
version had extended the original autobiography by several additional
chapters, it was necessary to incorporate the old with the new. The
published volume was released in the summer.
Dr.
Buchanan continued the research program on the extent of the market he is
doing jointly with Yong Yoon. They achieved an analytical breakthrough by
the incorporation of goods that exhibit stochastic demands—goods that are
positively valued, but which will only be demanded from the market
probabilistically. When such goods are introduced, Adam Smith’s theorem on
the relationship between market size and economic productivity holds even if
all of the standard conditions for competitive general equilibrium are
satisfied. These findings will be included in several papers in preparation
as well as in the projected book.
Bryan Caplan
Bryan Caplan
This has been the most successful year of Dr. Caplan’s career. His book
The Myth of the Rational Voter, was published by Princeton
University Press. It has been reviewed by The Economist, The Wall Street
Journal, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times,
and many other outlets, and was called “the best political book this year”
by The New York Times.
The book's
reception has opened many doors, such as an op-ed piece in The Wall Street
Journal, invitations from The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, and
a book excerpt for the Cato Institute Policy Analysis. He has also been a
guest on numerous radio and television programs, including “Thinking
Allowed” and “Night Waves” on the BBC, Bloomberg's “On the Economy,” the
syndicated “Culture Shocks with Barry Lynn,” C-SPAN2, and a profile on New
York NBC affiliate, WNBC.
In addition he and co-author Edward Stringham were nominated and received
first prize for a Templeton Enterprise Award for “Mises, Bastiat, Public
Opinion, and Public Choice.”
Several other projects came to fruition during this period for Professor
Caplan. Kyklos has also accepted “Behavioral
Economics and Perverse Effects of the Welfare State” (co-authored with Scott
Beaulier). The Review of Austrian Economics accepted his piece on “Mises'
Democracy-Dictatorship Equivalence Theorem.” And the publication
Theoretical Inquiries in Law accepted his paper on “Privatizing the
Adjudication of Disputes” (co-authored with Edward Stringham).
Professor Caplan’s next two big projects are a new book and a
new survey. He has written the first chapter of his next book, tentatively
entitled The Case Against Education. This work takes the signaling model
out of the ghetto of high theory and uses it to critique our entire system
of education. Blending economics, psychology, and political economy, The
Case Against Education will argue that despite its high private return, much
of the education now provided in this country has a negative social return.
In 2007, Professor Caplan and co-authors Ilya Somin and Wayne Grove
designed a survey to compare the beliefs of laymen and experts on
political responsibility. They were allocated 25 questions of space on one
of Zogby's omnibus surveys.
In coming months they will have exclusive access to a new, unique data
entitled “Who In Government Has Influence Over What?” This will be the
foundation for a series of papers.
Roger D. Congleton
 Roger D. Congleton
spent the first
half of the year at the Southern Denmark University (SDU) where he was the
Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies. While there Prof.
Congleton finished a number of ongoing research projects, gave a variety
of talks at universities and research centers in Europe, and developed new
courses that were jointly offered by the American Studies and Political
Science Departments. He also worked on his long-standing book project on
the emergence of Western democracy (Perfecting Parliament).
The highlights of the
research completed during the year are a two-volume collection of articles
on the theory of rent-seeking edited with Kai Konrad and Arye Hillman,
which should be published by Springer Press in 2008 and a long paper in
the European Journal of Political Economy (June 2007) that
summarizes one of the core arguments of his project on the emergence of
Western democracy. Two other papers were accepted during the visit, and
were very recently published. One provides a rational choice explanation
for the emergence of state social welfare programs in the late nineteenth
century (Constitutional Political Economy, September 2007), and
the other provides an explanation for the relative success of democracies
in the past two centuries, given the limited information available to most
voters (Public Choice, September 2007). He presented a new paper on
the emergence of US democracy at a conference in Cambridge in early
August. (Copies of the forthcoming and recently published papers are
available at (http://rdc1.net/forthcoming/index.htm.)
In addition to writing and
teaching, Professor Congleton presented seven seminars and attended two
small conferences in Denmark, and also presented eleven other seminars at
universities and research institutes and at academic meetings in Italy,
Sweden, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Japan. Professor Congleton
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. He reviewed approximately two dozen articles for those and
other journals including the American Economic Review and the
American Political Science Review.
Tyler Cowen
 Tyler Cowen
published
a book on popular economics called Discover Your Inner
Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and
Motivate Your Dentist, published by Dutton/Penguin. The book has been
covered by The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian,
National Public Radio, and numerous other media sources. So far foreign
language rights have been sold to South Korea, Japan, the Netherlands,
Portugal, and Spain. He also continued work on his book on normative
ethics and economics growth and published several articles as well.
Professor Cowen also continued his columns for The New York
Times on economic policy, wrote for Forbes, wrote for Slate.com, and
wrote for numerous other outlets. He and Alex Tabarrok continue to write
the daily weblog Marginal Revolution (www.marginalrevolution.com),
which recently received its eleventh millionth unique visit. He and
Professor Tabarrok continued work on a principles textbook together; this
project is now almost finished with the first draft. They have a contract
with Freeman Worth, the largest textbook publisher in the world, and it
will be part of a line of textbooks along with Steve Levitt, Paul Krugman,
and others.
Robin Hanson
 Professor
Hanson continues to lead the growing new field of prediction markets.
This year he developed a blog, Overcoming Bias, which now
averages three thousand readers a day. He revised a great number of old
papers for publication, and began work on a book on the rationality of
disagreement. He also completed a working paper on when extraordinary
claims can give extraordinary evidence. He found that even moderately
error-prone reports of an originally extraordinary claim, transmitted
through a short reporting chain, can completely lose their information
value.
Ronald A. Heiner
Professor
Heiner continues his research on cooperation in one-shot prisoners’
dilemmas. He submitted several papers for journal publication.
Robust
Contingent Cooperation Even in Pure One-Shot PD’s
shows that
contingent cooperators will evolve from any initial population through any
payoff monotonic process. Robust Evolution of Contingent
Cooperators in One-Shot Prisoners’ Dilimmas presents the mathematical
analysis (generalized with explicit communication costs) needed to derive
the results in the first paper. Expected Utility & Subjective Probability
Axioms For N-Player Causal Games generalizes earlier expected utility
axioms by Savage and Fishburn.
Professor
Heiner is also writing a book entitled Evolution & Rationality of
Contingent Cooperation, on contingent cooperation in prisoners’
dilemmas. To be consistent with recent journal paper revisions, the book
now also incorporates communication and signaling costs.
Laurence R. Iannaccone
In more than
fifty publications, Professor Iannaccone has applied economic insights to
study denominational growth, church attendance, religious giving,
conversion, extremism, international trends, and many other aspects of
religion and spirituality. His articles have appeared in numerous academic
journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of
Political Economy, the American Journal of Sociology, and the
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.
Since coming
to George Mason University, Iannaccone has established a yearly
international conference on “Religion, Economics, and Culture,” an
interdisciplinary “Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, and
Culture” (ASREC), and a new “Consortium for the Economic Study of Religion”
(CESR).
In 2007,
Professor Iannaccone had an article entitled “What’s Good About Religious
Fundamentalism?” in Science and Spirit, and was a speaker at
the Mercatus Center on the topic of Market for Martyrs & Radical
Religion.
Garett Jones
 Professor
Jones's ongoing research agenda is to explain why cognitive skills (math and
science scores, SAT scores, IQ scores, etc.) appear to matter more for
groups than for individuals. This year, his work has been accepted by the
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization and by
Economic Inquiry, and he presented a new paper at the American Economic
Association meetings. The former article, in particular, showed that
smarter groups appear to be more cooperative in repeated prisoner's dilemma
games. Thus, smarter groups may be better at building high-productivity
economic and political institutions.
Before coming
to the Center last fall, Dr. Jones was a visiting scholar at the University
of California at San Diego and Assistant Professor of Economics and Finance
at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Previously, he served as an
economic policy adviser to Senator Orrin Hatch, working on tax and labor
issues. He has also served as an economist to the Joint Economic Committee
of Congress. He holds a BA in history from Brigham Young, an MPA from
Cornell, an MA in political science from UC Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in
economics from UC San Diego.
David Levy
Much of Dr.
Levy’s and co-author Sandra Peart’s work this year revolved around the
role of sympathy in choice, which is inspired by Adam Smith’s
Theory of Moral Sentiments. They had a major paper accepted for
publication in the Adam Smith Review which looked at the topic of
whether there are Stoic foundations of Smith’s sympathetic principle. A
case before the United States Supreme Court involving a dispute between
the Justices about Smith’s views of motivation and monopoly inspired a
paper from them for the Supreme Court Economic Review.
They explored
the question of what to do about sympathetic bias in a paper in the
Eastern Economic Journal symposium on econometric ethics. They also
presented a paper on “sympathetic bias” at the National Cancer Institute
Cancer Prevention and Control Colloquium; it will appear in Statistical
Methods of Medical Research. The paper also received some attention from
David Warsh’s Economic Principles.
Sympathy and
expertise is also at issue in their trio of papers on evolution that were
accepted for publication. The Peart-Levy article forthcoming in the
European Journal of Political Economy publishes a previously
unpublished letter from Charles Darwin to a defendant in the
Bradlaugh-Besant trail and discusses the debate around the role of the
expert in directing human affairs. An article accepted by Constitutional
Political Economy revisits Buchanan’s argument against F. A. Hayek’s
anti-constructivist social evolutionary conclusions. The third
paper, accepted for publication in JEBO, looks at the role of The
Economist magazine in the transmission of social evolutionary thinking
in mid 19th century Britain.
Professors
Levy and Peart also attended
two
academic panels on last year’s Vanity of the Philosopher. One
panel was held at the Eastern Economic Association meeting in New York and
one was during the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical
Association in San Francisco. In addition to co-directing the eighth annual
Summer Institute, Dr. Levy made local arrangements for the History of
Economics Society Annual Conference, which was organized by Sandra Peart in
her capacity as the HES President-Elect. The HES meeting attracted 195
participants from around the world. When Dr. Peart introduced James Buchanan
as the Distinguished Guest Lecturer, she pointed out that his presence says
how seriously the center and the department take the history of economics.
John Nye
Professor
Nye’s book War, Wine, and Taxes: The Political Economy of
Anglo-French Trade 1689-1900
appeared this July from Princeton University Press. A roundtable on the
book is scheduled for the Midwest Political Science Association meetings in
2008. He is currently at work on a related piece on nineteenth century
tariffs as part of the World Bank project on agricultural trade distortions.
His paper on
“Distributional Coalitions, the Industrial Revolution, and the Origins of
Economic Growth in Britain,” which was co-authored with Joel Mokyr, appeared
in Public Choice. Another paper on institutions is
forthcoming in the Guidebook to the New Institutional Economics.
Professor Nye’s paper “Did the Soviets Collude: A Statistical Analysis of
Championship Chess 1940-64,” co-authored with Charles Moul, is under review
at a professional journal. Also written in collaboration with Charles Moul
was a paper on the application of Benford’s Law to Macroeconomic statistics
that appeared this summer in the B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics.
Dr. Nye and
and co-author Moul are also collaborating on other projects, including a
revised measure of inequality that takes into account positional goods, as
well as a study of the non-pecuniary benefits of graduating from elite
undergraduate institutions in the U.S.
He is also at
work on a new paper challenging recent arguments for gas taxes based on
insufficient empirical support from the literature on optimal Pigou
taxation.
Ilia Rainer
Professor
Rainer had two major publications this year with co-author Nicola
Gennaioli. His “The Modern Impact of Precolonial Centralization in Africa”
was published as a lead article in the Journal of Economic
Growth, and his “Precolonial Centralization and Institutional Quality
in Africa” came out in the MIT Press edited volume. The former article has
been cited by the leading Russian economic magazine Kommersant – Vlast
as one of the few articles essential for understanding the costs and
benefits of colonialism.
Professor
Rainer has also been working on three new projects. In his “Ethnicity of
Leaders and Primary Education: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa” with
co-author Raphaël Franck, he tests whether the ethnicity of African
National leaders can explain the subnational variation in the provision of
education in African countries. He and Raphaël Franck also wrote “The
Determinants of Ministerial Reshuffling in Sub-Saharan Africa,” which asks
under which circumstances were African dictators more likely to reshuffle
their ministers. Finally, in his “Ethnicity and Fate of Leaders in
Sub-Saharan Africa” with co-author Mikael Priks, Professor Rainer studies
the differences between inter- and intra-ethnic leadership transitions in
Africa.
.
Thomas Stratmann
Professor Stratmann has teamed up with the experimental group at ICES at
GMU 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 three
research papers covering topics of voter turnout, vote choices, candidate
advertising, and welfare in elections. This exciting research project is
drawing graduate students who are writing dissertations in this area. In
2007, Professor Stratmann continued his work on campaign finance issues. His
research resulted in the publication of “Campaign Finance Reform and
Electoral Competition: Comment” which was co-authored with Francisco J.
Aparicio-Castillo and was published in Public Choice. Professor
Stratmann also published “Political Contribution Caps and Lobby Formation:
Theory and Evidence” in the Journal of Public Economics with Allan
Drazen and Nuno Limão (Univ. of Maryland). Further, he published
“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 has resulted in a co-authored paper with
IMF staffer Bernardin Akitoby, forthcoming in the 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” which
is forthcoming the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization.
Alexander Tabarrok
Alexander
Tabarrok's
primary work over the past year has been on a textbook entitled
The New Principles: Microeconomics and
Macroeconomics with Tyler Cowen. This is a major undertaking intended
to be competitive with texts by Mankiw, Krugman et al.
Other
highlights include three refereed articles including a paper on the
history of privateers that was cited in The
New York Times. He also filed an Amici Curiae Brief to the U.S. Court
of Appeal co-authored with Sam Peltzman and others. His Open Letter on
Immigration was signed by over 500 economists including 5 Nobel Prize
winners and generated extensive media appearances including a notable
appearance on Lou Dobb’s CNN Tonight.
Tabarrok and Agan also published an important study for the
Manhattan Institute entitled,
Medical Malpractice Awards, Insurance, and Negligence:
Which Are Related? The study found among
other things that every dollar increase in tort awards leads to a one
dollar increase in medical malpractice insurance rates.
He continues to write for
Marginal Revolution,
his very successful economics blog with Tyler Cowen.
Gordon Tullock
Gordon Tullock
has written
and submitted a book to publishers entitled American Foreign
Affairs: A Cursory History. He also wrote the articles “The Mystery of
Brazil” and “Bio-Economics After 34 Years,” for Public Choice and the
Challenges of Democracy. He also submitted a review called
“Reflections on Caplan’s Myth of the Rational Voter,” for Public
Choice.
He is
currently working on two articles, “Inherited Control and National
Performance.” and “Puzzles in Economic History,” for publication in 2008.
Yong J. Yoon
Yong J. Yoon
published an
article, one reprint and had four articles accepted for publication. His
forthcoming co-authored article with Jim Buchanan, “Public Choice and the
Extent of the Market” will appear in Kyklos. Another joint
paper “Stochastic Demand: another Smith Puzzle” was accepted for inclusion
in the Elgar Companion to Adam Smith (ed. Jeffrey Young). His paper
“Stochastic Demand, Specialization, and Increasing Returns” was accepted
by the Journal of Division of Labor and Transaction Costs. This
paper is a derivative from the more inclusive project on the extent of the
market with Jim Buchanan. “Globalization and Internal and External
Inequality” will appear in The International Journal of Economic Policy
Studies. This article is based on his speech as a guest speaker at the
International Conference organized by Japan Economic Policy Association,
in Tokyo, Japan in December 2007. The article discusses income
distribution and globalization and offers methodology for addressing this
question.
In June and
July Professor Yoon taught as a visiting professor at Sogang University in
Seoul, Korea. The seminar course he taught covered Public Choice and
Globalization. To the Korean Hayek Society this year he presented
“Globalization and Public Choice” and discussed his ideas about
globalization, technology, and income distribution. He also published an
article in Korean on related topics entitled “Globalization, Politics, and
Culture” in Center for Free Enterprise, June 2007.
Staff
Jo Ann Burgess
Jo Ann had
another busy year as Buchanan House activities continued at a frenetic
pace in 2007 with the preparation and execution of the Buchanan Workshop
in March, the farewell for Betty Tillman in April, the release of Dr.
Buchanan’s new book in the summer and the arrival of Otto Davis’s
memorabilia in December.
She had the
bittersweet duty of bidding farewell and planning a celebration for the
retirement of Betty Tillman after over fifteen years together at the
center. Jo Ann also welcomed a host of new faces in 2007, including her new
graduate assistant Nakul Kumar, and resident faculty member Garett Jones. Jo
Ann also hosted a luncheon for the executive committee of the History of
Economics Society during their annual meeting in June.
Not just
people have come Jo Ann’s way this year. Discussions between the family of
the late Otto A. “Toby” Davis and the center regarding Professor Davis’s
professional collection were successfully concluded. She looks forward to a
busy 2008 as she and Nakul begin the job of unpacking, shelving and sorting
through approximately 100 boxes of valuable research that were delivered to
the Buchanan House.
Lisa Hill-Corley
Lisa Hill-Corley continues her assistance to the main resident faculty
support and her coordination of the center’s events and overseeing the
Center budget and publications.
She, as part of an able team with Jane Perry and Kail Padgitt, had a very
busy summer coordinating and assisting with the three programs hosted by the
center, the Outreach Conference, the Summer Institute, and the annual
meeting of the History of Economics Society, which together brought in over
300 scholars to the George Mason campus. Lisa also assisted Jo Ann Burgess
with the gala 80th birthday and retirement celebration for Betty Tillman and
the fall gathering for the department at the Buchanan house.
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.
She is grateful to Jane, Kail, Jo Ann and all the helpful professors and
students for being such a wonderful team to be a part of!
Jane Perry
Jane Perry
has just finished her first year as part of the administrative team in
Carow Hall, after joining the Center staff on December 11, 2006.
In addition to
her regular duties of providing resident faculty support, and helping with
the daily operations and management of Carow Hall, Jane provided
administrative and logistical support for all of the weekly Public Choice
Seminar Series presentations held during 2007. She also assisted program
coordinator Lisa Hill-Corley with general and administrative support for the
Outreach Conference, the Summer Institute, and the History of Economics
Society annual meeting held at GMU in June 2007. Her proofreading and
editorial skills were put to very good use on several projects during the
year.
Jane wants to
thank all those who helped to make her first year at GMU enjoyable and
successful, particularly Jo Ann Burgess, Kail Padgitt, Betty Tillman, and
Dana Vogel. She is especially appreciative and grateful to her wonderful
colleague Lisa Hill-Corley for so generously sharing her institutional
knowledge and guidance.
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.
Department
chair and Center director Donald Boudreaux acted as emcee and introduced the
speakers for the evening: Gordon Tullock, Robert Tollison, Tyler Cowen,
Hartmut Kliemt, Dwight Lee, and James Buchanan. At the conclusion of the
evening, Betty was presented with gifts made possible by generous donations
from her many friends and colleagues. She received a computer, printer, and
the peripherals to help her continue to correspond with all of the
professors and staff, and her “children” who had the pleasure of knowing her
during her 46 years in Public Choice.
Pictures from the Betty Tillman 80th
Birthday and Retirement Gala!
Janet Byrd 1951-2006
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