About the Columnists
Biographies of Econlib columnists and frequent contributors
About the Columnists
Bryan Caplan is an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University.
For more information, see his bio on EconLog.
Bryan Caplan is co-editor of EconLog, along with Arnold Kling.
Donald Cox
Donald Cox is a professor of Economics at Boston College. His main research area concerns intergenerational transfer behavior, in both developing and developed countries.
His recent papers, “Private Transfers within the Family: Mothers, Fathers, Sons and Daughters” and “Biological Basics and Intergenerational Transfers,” deal with the connection between reproductive biology and the economics of family behavior. His research and teaching take an inter-disciplinary approach, using ideas from fields such as biology, psychology and anthropology to improve economic models.
He has served as a consultant for the World Bank and is currently study section participant at the National Institutes of Health. He was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Cox holds a Ph.D. in economics from Brown University, and received his undergraduate degree in economics from Boston College.
Arnold Kling
Arnold Kling received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980.
For more information, see his bio on EconLog.
Arnold Kling is co-editor of EconLog, along with Bryan Caplan.
David M. Levy
David M. Levy is currently professor of economics at George Mason University and Director of the Center for the Study of Public Choice. Levy received the Economics Department citation as the outstanding undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley in 1966 and his Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Chicago in 1979. He has published over 50 contributions to professional journals ranging from the Journal of the History of Ideas to Econometric Theory. His book, How the Dismal Science Got Its Name: Classical Economics & the Ur-Text of Racial Politics, has been recently published by the University of Michigan Press. He currently is a member of the American Statistical Association’s Committee on Professional Ethics. His research interests include statistical ethics, the relationship between language and optimization (Economic Ideas of Ordinary People: From Preferences to Trade, Routledge 1992) and the history of economics in which the “dismal science” plays a much-misunderstood role. Levy and Sandra Peart are currently working the various attacks on classical economics’ doctrine of human equality.
Ibsen Martinez
Ibsen Martinez is a columnist, journalist, and award-winning playwright from Caracas, Venezuela. Since 1995, he has written a weekly column for El Nacional.
His writings have appeared in El Nuevo Herald, Miami, Letras Libres, Madrid, and El Pais in Madrid.
Martinez has written several plays for the theater. His “Humboldt and Bonpland, Taxidermists” (1981) earned him a national award in Venezuela.
Fred S. McChesney
Fred S. McChesney is the Class of 1967 / James B. Haddad Professor of Law at Northwestern Law School; and Professor, Department of Management & Strategy, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.
He received the J.D. from the University of Miami and his Ph.D. (economics) from the University of Virginia, after studying at the Institut d’Études des Sciences Politiques (“Sciences Po”) in Paris. He practiced law in Washington, D.C., and then joined the Federal Trade Commission, where he was Associate Director for Policy and Evaluation. Prior to joining the faculty at Northwestern, he was Professor of Law at Cornell University (1997-99); and Robert T. Thompson Professor of Law and Business, as well as Professor of Economics, at Emory University (1983-97). He has also taught at the University of Chicago, and twice as professeur invité in the Diplôme d’Études Approfondies program at the Université d’Aix-Marseille III.
Professor McChesney teaches primarily in business and related fields, including corporations, finance, statistics and antitrust. He has published dozens of articles in both economics and law journals on a variety of economics- and business-related subjects. His book, Money for Nothing: Politicians, Rent Extraction and Political Extraction (Harvard University Press, 1997) was widely and favorably reviewed. His Property Rights: Cooperation, Conflict and Law (co-authored by Terry L. Anderson) was published in 2003 by Princeton University Press. He has published three other books: The Causes and Consequences of Antitrust: The Public Choice Perspective (co-authored, University of Chicago Press, 1995); Economic Inputs, Legal Outputs: The Role of Economists in Modern Antitrust (John Wiley & Sons, 1998); Antitrust Law: Interpretation and Implementation (co-authored, Michie/Lexis, 1998). He has also taught at the Centro di Formazione e Studi in Naples, and at the Russian Ministry of Justices Program of Instruction in American Law in Moscow. He serves on the editorial boards of three journals: Public Choice, Managerial and Decision Economics, and the Journal des Economistes et des Études Humaines. His email address is f-mcchesney@law.northwestern.edu.
Declan McCullagh
Declan McCullagh is the Washington bureau chief for Wired News. He lives and works in Washington, DC. An award-winning journalist, McCullagh writes and speaks frequently about technology and politics. Before accepting his current position at Wired, he was reporter for Time Digital Daily and Time Magazine, as well as a correspondent for HotWired. He has written regular columns for George magazine, UPI, Business 2.0 magazine, and occasional pieces for Slate, The New Republic, and intellectualcapital.com. He has appeared on CNN, NPR’s All Things Considered, ABC News’ Good Morning America, and Fox News, and has been a visiting faculty member at the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University.
McCullagh has been writing about the Internet since 1990: He was the first Internet reporter to join the National Press Club; he participated in the first White House dot com press pool; he was the first journalist to question Vice President Gore’s claim to have created the Internet, and broke the story that U.S. District Judge Thomas Jackson ruled that Microsoft violated antitrust laws.
McCullagh studied cognitive science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he wrote for the student newspaper, and was president of the student body. During college, he worked as a programmer at NeXT Computer.
In his spare time, McCullagh moderates politech, a mailing list looking broadly at politics and technology. He also amuses himself with analog photography. In addition to tinkering with his original NeXT cube at home, he programs in C, mySQL, and Perl, and maintains a Linux server that supports half a dozen web sites.
Email: declan@well.com
Website: http://www.mccullagh.org
PGP key
Jeffrey A. Miron
Jeffrey A. Miron is Professor of Economics at Boston University and President of Bastiat Institute, Inc. Miron received a B.A., magna cum laude, from Swarthmore College in 1979 and a Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T. in 1984. Miron has served on the faculty at the University of Michigan (associate professor with tenure) and as a visiting professor at the Sloan School of Management. From 1992-1998, he served as chairman of the Department of Economics at Boston University. He has published more than twenty-five articles in refereed journals and thirty op-eds in the Boston Herald, Boston Business Journal, and Boston Globe. He has been the recipient of an Olin Fellowship from the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Sloan Foundation Faculty Research Fellowship, and he is currently an academic advisor to the Pioneer Institute. His area of expertise is the economics of libertarianism, with particular emphasis on the economics of illegal drugs. Miron founded the Bastiat Institute in April, 1999.
Michael Munger
Prof. Munger received his Ph.D. in Political Economy at Washington University in St. Louis in 1984. Following his graduate training, he worked as a staff economist at the Federal Trade Commission. His first teaching job was in the Economics Department at Dartmouth College, followed by appointments in the Political Science Department at the University of Texas at Austin (1986-1990) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1990-7). He moved to Duke University in 1997, where he now chairs the Political Science Department. Munger served as President of the Public Choice Society from 1996-8. In addition to more than 80 articles and papers, Prof. Munger has produced (with Melvin Hinich) three books, Ideology and the Theory of Political Choice (University of Michigan Press, 1994), Analytical Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Empirical Studies in Comparative Politics (Kluwer Academic Press, 1998). His most recent book, Analyzing Policy: Choices, Conflicts, and Practices, was published in August 2000 by W.W. Norton. Current research interests include the evolution of the ideology of racism in the antebellum South, and a study of complexity in an experimental setting using human subjects.
Michael Munger is a guest blogger during the week of August 8, 2004 on EconLog.
Kevin M. Murphy
Kevin M. Murphy is the George Pratt Shultz Professor of Business Economics and Industrial Relations at the Graduate School of Business of the University of Chicago. Murphy receive an A.B. in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1981 and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1986. His areas of expertise include the empirical analysis of inequality, unemployment and relative wages and the economics of growth and development. Murphy has published more than 20 articles in refereed journals, numerous paper in edited volumes, as well as opinion pieces in The Wall Street Journal. His work has been reviewed and cited extensively in The New York Times, Business Week, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, and Fortune. Murphy has been the recipient of a Sloan Foundation Faculty Research Fellowship and an Earhart Foundation Fellowship. Murphy is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 1997 he received the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded every other year by the American Economics Association to the outstanding U.S. economist under age 40.
John V.C. Nye
John V.C. Nye is an Associate Professor of Economics and History at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his B.S. in Physics from Caltech and his M.A. and Ph.D from Northwestern University in Economics. He is a specialist in European economic history, and has written numerous papers on French and British history including “The Myth of Free-Trade Britain and Fortress France” in the Journal of Economic History, 1991 and “Tax Britannica: Nineteenth Century Tariffs and British National Income” with Sami Dakhlia, forthcoming in Public Choice.
He is also a founding member of the International Society for the New Institutional Economics (ISNIE) and co-editor with John Drobak of the book, Frontiers of the New Institutional Economics, Academic Press, 1997. He has been closely involved with the Ronald Coase Institute, with which he has worked to promote the New Institutional Economics in Central and Eastern Europe.
He was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution and in the Spring of 2004 will be teaching at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences-Po) where he will serve as Visiting Professor of Economics.
Sandra J. Peart
Sandra Peart is professor of economics at Baldwin-Wallace College and Director of the Summer Institute for the Preservation of the History of Economics at George Mason University. She is a Fellow for the American Council on Education in 2005-06. She received her B.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Toronto in 1982 and 1989. Her dissertation on the economics of W. S. Jevons was awarded the Best Dissertation Prize by the History of Economics Society. She taught at the University of Toronto and the College of William and Mary before coming to Baldwin-Wallace in 1991. She has published articles on Utilitarianism, the methodology of J. S. Mill, rationality and intertemporal choice, and the transition to neoclassicism, in journals such as the Manchester School, the Canadian Journal of Economics, HOPE and JHET. In 1998, with Evelyn L. Forget, she organized a conference supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada celebrating the work of Samuel Hollander. With Forget, she edited the conference volume (Reflections on the Classical Canon in Economics, Routledge 2001). She serves on the Executive Committee of the History of Economics Society, and is working with David Levy on visual representations of human heterogeneity.
Morgan Rose
Morgan Rose is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Washington University in St. Louis, with research interests in industrial organization, corporate governance
and economic history. He received an M.A. in economics from both Washington University and the University of Missouri-Columbia. Prior to attending Washington University, he served as a senior analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. He wrote for the Econlib Teacher’s Corner series while serving as Editorial Assistant.