Ryan Safner

I am an Economist at the Office of the Chief Economist at the U.S. Copyright Office.

Outside of my day job, I am a lifelong learner, researcher, and communicator of economic ideas. Previously, I was Associate Professor of Economics at Hood College, and have taught 17 different economics (and adjacent) courses over 10 years. I am a firm believer of providing public goods & promoting open source materials, so you can find all course materials on my custom course websites. I write about economic ideas and understanding the world in a non-technical way at my Substack, Safnerism.

My personal research agendas explore the political economy of innovation, economic growth, and intellectual property using tools & frameworks like new institutional economics, public choice, market process economics, and (more experimentally) computational models.

I am a passionate user of R for data analysis, and Quarto and GitHub for managing my workflow. I try to share some things I have built for educational purposes on my software page. I maintain a repository of guides & write about the practice of data science & economics at safneR scripts.

Disclaimer: All opinions expressed on this website are my own and do not represent the views or policies of the U.S. Copyright Office or any other institution.