Teaching

Current Courses (Spring 2020)
ECON 306 - Microeconomic Analysis
ECON 326 - Industrial Organization
ECON 410 - Public Economics

All Courses Taught

Publications

Copyright laws traditionally attempt to incentivize expression and minimize free rider problems through legal restrictions, at the expense of closing off access to cultural history. However, entrepreneurial changes to institutions and the creation of alternative governance structures can allow for spaces that facilitate expression without resorting to the copyright approach. Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, stands as a highly visible example of such institutional entrepreneurship, leveraging copyright law against its intended purpose. This paper uses the Bloomington School’s IAD framework to explain the success of Wikipedia’s alternative model of managing a common resource of free encyclopedia articles, and suggests a roadmap for understanding the role of institutional entrepreneurship in crafting alternative governance structures to foster expression.
In Journal of Institutional Economics, 2017
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The most robust framework for understanding the evolution and consequences of copyright statutes in the United States is the dynamics of interventionism. I apply the framework of Kirzner’s (1985) perils of regulation to the general revision of copyright law in 1976, and explore its effects on entrepreneurship and discovery processes. Critics of copyright commonly recognize the distortions of rent-seeking, but I emphasize the utility of interventionism to explain the “unsimulated” and the “stifled” discovery processes set in motion by copyright interventions, which use legal processes to allocate resources, and deter future discovery by raising transaction costs.
In Review of Austrian Economics, 2016
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Research

. Cryptocopyright: The Potential of Protecting Intellectual Property on the Blockchain. 2018.

. Kickstart my Art: Are Intellectual Property and Crowdfunding Complements or Substitutes?. 2018.

. The Network Origins of Economic Growth. 2018.

. Institutional Entrepreneurship, Wikipedia, and the Opportunity of the Commons. In Journal of Institutional Economics, 2017.

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. Learning by Doing: Who's Learning? Who's Doing? and Other Production Function Myths. 2016.

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. Pirate Thy Neighbor: The Protectionist Roots of International Copyright. 2016.

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. 'Public Good' or 'Good for the Public?' How Political Entrepreneurship has Endogenized the Public Funding of Science. 2016.

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. The Perils of Copyright Regulation. In Review of Austrian Economics, 2016.

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Recent Posts

More Posts

Last updated on 11 min read rstats, teaching

This is an opinionated post based on how I teach my undergraduate econometrics course. It will not be for everybody. The title applies mostly to anyone who wants to do data science or econometrics with R. This is the second time I have taught this course with R, and I have changed it around in many ways that I think optimize the process for students. In this post, I’ll cover just two major changes:

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Last updated on 4 min read teaching, workflow

This Fall semester, I have made dedicated websites for all of my courses at Hood College that host nearly all the course content. You can see them all here. My interest was sparked when I saw Andrew Heiss’ amazing course websites. Until this point, all of my course content has lived on Blackboard for my students, though I have also tried to post syllabi and lecture slides (if not additional resources) on my personal website over the past few years.

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Last updated on 10 min read rstats, teaching

This summer, I am overhauling my econometrics class in many ways, in part because I was pleased to recieve a teaching grant from my college to make more R resources for my econometrics class. Last Fall was the first time I had taught it using R, and I’ve learned a ton since then. Expect a flurry of posts in the coming weeks more on those topics. This post, however, explores some of the trends that I have been thinking about in teaching econometrics, and something monotonous that I have been struggling with that encapsulates the tension in these trends: what to name my course.

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Last updated on 8 min read rstats, teaching

One of the advantages of using Stata for linear regression is that it can automatically use heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors simply by adding , r to the end of any regression command. Anyone can more or less use robust standard errors and make more accurate inferences without even thinking about what they represent or how they are determined since it’s so easy just to add the letter r to any regression.

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Last updated on 3 min read rstats, teaching

As I have mentioned in other posts, this semester I trying to maximize the number of intuitive visualizations for my students to master economic and mathematical concepts more in my teaching, as well as develop my own R skills. For my intermediate microeconomics course, I recently put together an interactive Shiny App with R that demonstrates the effect of a tax on consumers and producers. Simply input your own (inverse) demand and supply functions and the size of the tax, and the graph and summary will update with the market equilibrium and the surpluses lost by the tax.

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