If you are curious about my
research interests, here are short descriptions of the two
main fields to which I devote my time.
I. Regional
Science This field draws researchers
from a variety of disciplines, but probably close to half
are economists. In economics, we usually call the field
'urban and regional economics.' The field focuses on the
spatial aspect of economic activity.
The Regional
Science Association International is the umbrella
organization for those who do regional science anywhere in
the world. The field has a dozen or so journals; here are
two examples:
A very nice resource that can teach you a lot about regional
science is the Web Book of
Regional Science, published by the Regional Research
Institute, at West Virginia University. Regional scientists
sometimes do theoretical work: producing formal mathematical
models that explain how economic activity is structured in
space. More often they do empirical work: examining the
actual patterns of spatial structure, and attempting to tell
the story of how that spatial structure came to be.
Empirical work involves using some very cool research tools:
II. Economic
Anthropology My interest in this field
stems from my experience as an undergraduate, where I had a
great course in economic anthropology. In graduate school, I
studied the work of Thorstein Veblen, who believed
that anthropology could provide economics with a realistic
view of human behavior. I still believe that anthropology
has much to teach economics, but it is also true that
economics has much to teach anthropology.
The
Economic anthropology addresses some fascinating
'big-picture' questions, such as the causes and consequences
of the Neolithic
revolution (about 10,000 BP), or the upper
Paleolithic revolution
(about 50,000 BP). Most economic anthropologists are
'materialists' and examine the ways in which a society's
economic base conditions other features of the society's
culture.
My own research in economic
anthropology usually involves applying tools that I have
learned in regional science. I am particularly interested in
the ethnographic database called the Standard
Cross-Cultural
Sample. I have a number of papers with Malcolm M. Dow,
of Northwestern University's Anthropology department, where
we deal with methodological issues in estimating models
using these data (here,
here,
here,
here,
and here).
I'm also the sole author on a couple of methodological
papers (here
and here).Using
the methods Malcolm and I developed, I've coauthored papers
with Christian
Brown and Wes Routon. Other work includes a
still-unpublished paper coauthored with Christa
Jensen that uses regional science methods to look at
how village markets attract itinerant vendors in Guatemala.
But I am also interested in
trying to apply some ideas from anthropology to regional
science. So far, my main effort has been an attempt to
explain urban
land
use patterns in a way that might come close to
satisfying Thorstein Veblen.