Ryan Safner

Education

  • Ph.D, Economics, 2015 (George Mason University)
  • M.A., Economics, 2013 (George Mason University)
  • B.A., Economics, 2011 (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 Associate Professor of Economics at Hood College. 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 regularly teach Microeconomic Analysis and Econometrics and rotate through economics 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.

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.