Michael D. Makowsky
Assistant Professor
Department of
Economics
Vitae
Published Articles Papers Under Review
Working Papers
I can be contacted at mmakowsky at towson dot edu
Vitae
Click
here for my C.V.
Published
and Forthcoming Refereed Journal Articles
Emergent Extremism in a Multi-Agent Model of Religious Clubs
Economic Inquiry, Forthcoming
Innovation,
Price Dispersion, and Emergent Increasing Returns to Scale
(with David M. Levy)
Journal of Economic Behavior and and Organization, March 2010, Volume 73, No. 3, pages 406-417
Determinants
of Traffic Citations: Political Economy at Any Speed (with
Thomas Stratmann)
American Economic Review, March 2009, Volume 99, No. 1
From
Scholarly Idea to Budgetary Institution: The Emergence of Cost-Benefit
Analysis (with Richard E. Wagner)
Constitutional Political Economy, March 2009, Volume 20, Issue 1
Accidental
Atheists: An Agent-based Model of Religious Regionalism (with
Laurence R.
Iannaccone)
Journal for the
Scientific Study of Religion, March 2007, Volume 46 (1), pages
1–16
An
Agent-Based Model of Mortality Shocks, Intergenerational Effects, and
Urban
Crime
Journal
of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, March 2006, Volume 9
Issue 2
Papers Under Review
A Theory of Liberal Churches
More Tickets, Fewer Accidents: How Cash-Strapped Towns make for Safer Roads (with
Thomas Stratmann)
Religon, Clubs, and Emergent Social Divides
Emergent Pareto-Levy Distributed Returns to Research in a Multi-Agent Model of Endogenous Technical Change (with David Levy)
Working Papers / Work in Progress
Endogenous Group Formation through Unproductive Costs (with Jason Aimone, Laurence Iannaccone, and Jared Rubin)
The Political Economy of Property Value Appraisal (with Shane Sanders)
Book Reviews and other writings
REVIEW:
Social Dynamics
Edited by H. Peyton Young and Steven N. Durlauf
Journal of
Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, June 2005 Volume 8, Issue
3
Human Navigational
Heuristics in Solving the Euclidean Travelling Salesman Problem
(with Tamas Makany)
An Agent-based Model of Crisis-Driven Migration (with Tamas Makany, Patrick Meier, and Jorge Tavares)
Popular
Media (interviews and references to my work)
Television:
Fox
5 WTTG News Interview
NBC 7 WHDH News Interview
Podcasts: National Tax Foundation (interviewed by K. Padgett)
Print:
Slate, by Tom Vanderbilt
Boston Globe Feature by Eric Moskowitz
New York Times
Column by Judy Chevalier
Chicago Tribune
Column by John Hilkevitch
The Atlantic Monthly,
Primary Sources
The New Republic by Zubin Jelveh
Blogs: Marginal Revolution (T.Cowen and A. Tabarrok) (2/20/07) (1/9/09)
Business Week (9/4/2007)
Economist's View (M. Thoma) (9/02/07)
How We Drive (Tom Vanderbilt) (11/15/08) (1/9/09)
Blogs of the St Louis Times-Dispatch, Rochester
Democrat and Chronicle San Antonio Express-News, Potomac News (my
childhood hometown newspaper) and various other
newspapers have also blogged/written about my work, but don't prefer to
keep their links up and running. Please drop me a note if any of the
above links are now empty.
Models
The applets requires
Java 1.4.1 or higher to run. They will not run on
Windows 95 or Mac OS 8 or 9. Mac users must have OS X 10.2.6 or higher
and use
a browser that supports Java 1.4 applets (Safari works, IE does not).
On other
operating systems, you may obtain the latest Java plugin from Sun's Java
site.
Urban Crime
(CAMSIM)
Religious
Regionalism
(MARS) with
Laurence R.
Iannaccone
- A preliminary user guide
to the model is available here.
* This a sampling of my Netlogo
models only . If you are interested in my java models, please email me
and I will be happy to honor your
request.
Teaching
ECON 201 Syllabus
ECON 640 Syllabus
(brief) Biography
I am a former
investment
pundit and public school teacher with a BA in biology
and economics from the University of Virginia. The logical next step
was graduate studies, leading to a Ph. D. in
economics at George Mason University. I am now an assistant professor
of economics at Towson University. My research to date focuses
on complex social phenomena, such as religious regionalism, culture divides,
extremism, and
urban crime, using agent-based computational models. I also pursue
more
traditional applied microeconomic interests in traffic law enforcement,
public finance, local
political economy, and price dispersion amidst increasing returns to
scale. More importantly, I am a competent deck hockey goalie with a
solid glove hand and a surprising capacity to get my pads to the low
corners, albeit one who does (occasionally) wander off his
angle. If you think you have the skills to get a shot by me, I advise
you to contact the good people at www.DCStreetHockey.com.
This site does not have a hit counter, but if it did I
assure you
that the number would becomprised of many digits.
This page is maintained, poorly, by
Michael Makowsky