The main focus of my research is in the area of public economics and political economy known as public choice: the processes by which decisions are made outside of traditional market structures. Whereas public economics typically asks what sorts of taxation and expenditure regimes have desirable efficiency properties, public choice tends to inquire about what sorts of policies are actually implemented, and why they tend to differ so dramatically from what economists might recommend.
I've recently completed a revision of a paper examining the distribution of job creation grants under two much maligned Canadian programs in the mid to late 1990s. While I find no evidence that districts represented by the governing Liberals fared better than others on the whole, I do find that Liberal districts in Western Canada, as well as those represented by Members of Cabinet whose continued tenure as MP was in doubt, received disproportionately large grant allocations. The paper is available on my working papers site.
The Review of Austrian Economics accepted the revision of my paper with Andrew Farrant examining the normative impact of the Austrian "economic calculation" argument in the context of non-benevolent social planners. During the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s and 1930s, the benevolence of the central planner was never questioned; Austrian critics convincingly demonstrated that central planners could never acquire the knowledge necessary for the formulation of an efficient central plan. Consequently, the economic calculation argument implies that socialism is less desirable than we might have thought. Farrant and I show that, when the benevolence assumption is removed, the normative force of the calculation argument reverses. A non-benevolent planner would use the information obtained through an efficient planning system to act as perfectly discriminating monopolist over the entire economy, extracting all surplus to himself. Absent the ability to engage in efficient economic calculation, the planner is restrained in his avarice, leaving the modal citizen far better off than would otherwise be the case. Mises's economic calculation argument improves outcomes under socialism by preventing total surplus extraction.
My recent publications are available here.
My next projects will involve more work with Andrew Farrant on robust political economy; improvements to my paper on expressive voting and the demand revealing process; and, further examination of the dataset I put together on HRDC job grants to see whether the grants influenced reelection prospects of incumbents. I also plan on doing a fair bit more work on expressive voting, especially concerning ways that economic retrospective voting combined with slack on the part of political agents can mitigate inefficiencies caused by expressive voting.