Media Contact:
Carrie Conko
Director of Communications
Mercatus Center at George Mason University
Office: 703-993-4899
Email: cconko@gmu.edu
John Wallis
Professor of Economics, University of Marylandwallis@econ.umd.edu
Biography
Dr. John Wallis is a professor of economics at the University of Maryland. His field of specialization is economic history. His major areas of interest are state and local government finances, the New Deal, the 1830s, and institutional change. He has worked on two large data projects. The first looks at state and local public finance data from 1790 to the present and the second develops a complete collection of American state institutions.
His work on the New Deal has focused on the effects of public work relief on private employment and the nature of fiscal relations between federal, state and local governments. His work on institutional change has focused on the importance of transaction costs, including an estimate of the size of the transaction sector from 1870 to 1970.
His work on the 1830s concerns the role of state governments in the development of the early economy. Publications include: "Measuring the Transaction Sector in The American Economy" (with Douglass C. North), in Stanley Engerman and Robert Gallman, eds., Long Term Factors in American Economic Growth, University of Chicago Press, 1988; " Railroads and Property Taxes," (with Jac Heckelman), Explorations in Economic History, 1997, "The Political Economy of New Deal Spending, Revisited, With and without Nevada," Explorations in Economic History, 1998, "The Anatomy of Sovereign Debt Crisis" (with Richard Sylla), Japan and the World Economy, 1998, "American Governments Finance in the Long Run: 1790 to 1990," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2000.
Dr. Wallis earned his PhD from the University of Washington in 1981. He spent two years as a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Chicago, and joined the faculty at Maryland in 1983.
