Education
- Ph.D, Economics, George Mason University
- M.A., Economics, George Mason University
- B.A., Economics, University of Connecticut
Interests
- Innovation
- Intellectual Property
- Economic Growth
- Data Analysis with R
Skills
- R, tidyverse, tidymodels, Stata, SQL, Git, LaTeX, Excel, Markdown, Quarto
I am an Economist at the U.S. Copyright Office.
Previously, I was Associate Professor of Economics at Hood College. I taught 17 different economics courses, regularly teaching Intermediate Microeconomics and Econometrics and various electives such as Game Theory, Industrial Organization, and Economics of the Law. I am a firm believer of providing public goods and promoting open source materials, so you can find all course materials on my custom course websites.
My research broadly explores the political economy of innovation, technological growth, and intellectual property using the tools of new institutional economics, public choice, and market process economics. I blog about these issues at Increasing Returns.
I am a passionate user of R for data analysis, and Quarto and GitHub for writing reproducible research, using version control, and managing my workflow. I blog here about using these tools in my research & teaching as well as learning how to use new tools and software.
Feel free to contact me at ryansafner [at] gmail [dot] com.