Mikayla Novak

Dr. Mikayla Novak is a Senior Fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She holds a PhD in Sociology from The Australian National University, a PhD in Economics from RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia), and a Bachelor of Economics (Honours) from The University of Queensland (Brisbane, Australia). 

Prior to joining Mercatus, she worked in academic and public policy roles, including in the Australian Treasury and Australian Productivity Commission, as well as the Institute of Public Affairs. She has contributed prolifically to public policy debates, with well over 200 opinion editorials on topics as diverse as budgetary and tax policy, public sector administration, welfare, and social policy.

Her research interests include Austrian and evolutionary economics, public choice, entangled political economy, economic sociology, public finance, and regulatory economics. She is the editor of Liberal Emancipation: Explorations in Political and Social Economy (Springer Nature, 2025) and the author of Freedom in Contention: Social Movements and Liberal Political Economy (Lexington Books, 2021) and Inequality: An Entangled Political Economy Perspective (Springer Nature, 2018). 

Her work has been published in a range of academic journals, including Research Policy, Constitutional Political Economy, Review of Austrian Economics, Journal of Institutional Economics, and Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice.

Novak is a contributing editorial board member of the Cosmos + Taxis journal, has edited several special issues of academic journals, and is Associate Executive Director of the Entangled Political Economy Research Network (EPERN), an international network of researchers with interest in advancing studies in entangled political economy.