Biography

I received my Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1981. I spent two years as a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Chicago, and joined the faculty at Maryland in 1983. My field of specialization is economic history.  My major area of interest is the interaction of economic and political development, particularly in the case of the United States.  I have specific interests in state and local government finances, the New Deal, the 1830s, and state constitutions.

My primary interest is understanding why governments behave the way the do, with particular emphasis on the kinds of government policies that promote or retard economic development. This is hardly a small question, nor one confined to economics. My interests overlap considerably with political science and history. My focus has been applying tools of economic analysis, quantitative and theoretical, to the history of American government.

One of my areas of interest is the construction of data sets. I began with state level employment indices in the 1930s. Since then, I have worked on two large data projects. The first collects government public finance data from 1790 to the present. The emphasis is on state and local data, since more or less reliable data is available for the federal government. The second project is a complete collection of American state constitutions. Surprisingly, there is not complete and accurate compilation of state constitutions.

I began working on the New Deal in graduate school. In 1983, I teamed up with Dick Sylla and John Legler and began collecting information on state and local government finances, from 1790 to the present. This led to a series of papers and questions about the interaction of government policy and economic development in the United States between the Revolution and the Civil War. Since the early 1990s, I have worked towards understanding early American government and the critical decades of the 1830s and 1840s. 

Over the last three years, I have been working on a book with Douglass North and Barry Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History which is forthcoming Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Specific papers and data sets are detailed in the research interest essays.