Alexander Tabarrok

Alexander Tabarrok Image

Alex Tabarrok is the director of the Center for Study of Public Choice and the Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center.

Early in the pandemic, he and Nobel Prize winner Michael Kremer and spoke to the U.S. Council of the Economic Advisors and the Domestic Policy Council of the White House about accelerating vaccines using incentives. That led to the creation of the Kremer team which subsequently came to write reports for multiple governments as well as advise the World Bank and other organizations on COVID policy. Research from this collaboration has led to several papers including a paper in Science. He spoke with several governments and advisory groups around the world on vaccine policy, including the G20’s High Level Independent Panel (HLIP). In April of 2021, I testified to Congress on vaccine policy.

On other fronts, his long-term work on ‘dominant assurance contracts’ also known as ‘crowdfunding with refund bonuses’ led to a productive collaboration with Tim Cason and Robertas Zubrickas and an experimental economics paper showing that the mechanism works extremely well! They are pursuing field research

He was also very pleased to publish a paper in the Journal of Urban Economics which shows that building in India is slowed down and increased in cost by lawsuits, many of which are generated by India’s Public Interest Litigation law.

 

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