My research interests are in the areas of economic prehistory, labor-managed firms, microeconomic theory, and institutions. By clicking on one of these topics, you can find my journal articles, books, and other material relevant to that topic.
For each publication, I give a link to the publisher's web site when possible. If no such link is available, I list the publication as it appears on my CV.
Here is a quick guide to my classification system.
'Economic Prehistory' refers to a joint research program with Clyde Reed on mobile foraging, sedentary foraging, agriculture, inequality, warfare, cities, and states, along with related topics such as marriage systems in small-scale societies. Our research combines economic logic and formal modeling with empirical evidence from archaeology and anthropology.
'Labor-Managed Firms' covers everything I have done on worker-owned firms, worker-controlled firms, why capital hires labor, membership markets, and related topics. The technical difficulty ranges from negligible (no math) to challenging (lots of math).
'Microeconomic Theory' is mostly about the theory of firm organization (excluding my research on LMFs described above). There are also a few early papers on other topics. Graduate training in economics is a prerequisite for understanding what is going on in these papers.
'Institutions' is a large and eclectic category. Topics include transaction cost economics, organization theory, social conventions, Chinese collective farms, and nuclear arsenals during the Cold War, among other things. Many of these papers are completely verbal. Others are largely verbal but include a formal model. A few are technically demanding.