Richard Wagner

Dr. Richard E. Wagner is a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center and Professor Emeritus at George Mason University

He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Virginia in 1966. Formerly, he has held faculty positions at The University of California, Irvine, Tulane University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Auburn University, and Florida State University. 

Wagner's fields of interest include public finance, macroeconomics, and political economy. He has published over 30 books and monographs, including Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes (Liberty Fund, 2000) co-authored with Nobel Prize Economist James M. Buchanan, To Promote the General Welfare: Market Processes vs. Political Transfers (Mercatus Center, 2019), Politics as a Peculiar Business: Insights from a Theory of Entangled Political Economy (Edward Elgar, 2016), Macroeconomics as Systems Theory: Transcending the Micro-Macro Dichotomy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), and Rethinking Public Choice (Edward Elgar, 2022). 

He has published in numerous journals, such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Law and Economics, Public Choice, the Journal of Monetary Economics, Constitutional Political Economy, the Review of Austrian Economics, Critical Review, the Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, the Journal of Institutional Economics, The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, and many more. 

He serves in an advisory relationship with such organizations as the Independent Institute, the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation, the James Madison Institute for Public Policy Studies, the Public Interest Institute, and the Virginia Institute for Public Policy. 

For further publications by Wagner, visit his University website.