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 Society for Economic Anthropology is the main professional organization for economic anthropology. For more information, see the Wikipedia entry. The field currently lacks a focused journal, but the following two publications often print articles that pertain to economic anthropology:


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.