I first became interested in social and cultural influences economic systems in the early 1990s. While traveling for a number of years through the U.S., Europe, Asia, and South America, I was interested in what was for sale in the different marketplaces. While in China I was introduced to edible snakes, Belgians showed a taste for horse meat and waffles, and of course there are 100 types of breakfast cereal in every grocery store in America. Following my curiosity about how economic systems come to look as they do, I studied economics at the University of Texas-Austin, and after receiving my B.A. in 2001, I continued my formal training in economics in the Economic Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. These years of formal training provided a great analytic “toolkit” for investigating economic processes, but eventually I found monetary policy and abstract mathematical models to be too removed from the research questions that got me thinking about economics in the first place.
My research interests fall within the broad spectrum of economic sociology. The focus of my work in the past two years has been an exploration of the concept of transparency as it is embodied in securities market regulation. My latest paper on this subject was included in a edited volume compiled by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Stockholm, and you can read it here. I am currently working on a project that investigates the diffusion of disclosure regulations across securities markets worldwide, with a particular interest in how such regulations are adopted and adapted to Kenyan securities markets. Underlying these empirical research projects is an interest in theories of institutional growth and change.
Some of my other research interests include:
A few links I find useful: