Teaching

Current Courses (Fall 2018)

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

Last updated on 2 min read rstats, teaching

This semester, I am posting my lecture slides for my Econometrics class on GitHub. While I usually post my lecture slides for my courses on my website or link to my Dropbox, those are the final PDF documents. On GitHub, I am posting both the final PDFs as well as the source .rmd files. I am primarily doing this for my econometrics students, who will be learning R and R Markdown for their assignments (which is how I write my slides), but this is also open to anyone.

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Last updated on 2 min read rstats

With the new school year in full swing, I have redesigned my personal website, and plan to make occasional posts on the tools I use in my research and teaching. Over the summer, I made the full conversion to using R, R Markdown, and Github for nearly everything I do in my professional life (including managing my website with Hugo/Academic). This semester, I am teaching econometrics to my students using R for the first time, and optionally nudging them to use R Markdown for their homeworks and paper assignment.

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