I am an Associate Professor in the Economics Department in the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University.I am also actively involved in the School of International Policy and Governance at WLU and at the Balsillie School of International Affairs.
My research has focused on institutional development at the international, national or local scales. Recent areas of focus have been the effects of ethnic diversity on government quality and the provision of public goods, and the interaction between formal institutions such as legal and taxation systems and social structures such as ethnic identity and levels of generalized trust. My work has been published in the Journal of African Economies and the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization.
For the Fall term of the 2023/24 academic year, I am scheduled to teach the Economics of Poverty (EC310B), a 3rd-year elective in the Economics program at Laurier and Public Sector Economics and the Global Economy (IP601) in the MIPP program at the Balsillie School of International Affairs.
In the Winter term, I am looking forward to returning to teach the three in-person sections of the Introduction to Macroeconomics (EC140) course at Laurier.
Finally, I expect to teach in the Spring semester in 2024, but my teaching schedule is not set at this time.
One of my goals for this year is to develop a complete (or at least coherent) set of course notes/text for the Sports Economics course that I have taught regularly since 2020. In my opinion, the existing Sports Economics texts are well-written and interesting, but set at a more introductory level than I would prefer. Given the structure of my course, I have looked for a text that fits the level at which I teach the course – having not found one, I guess I will write my own.
I have similar, but slightly more vague plans regarding a text for IP601.