Journal Articles:

2023 - "The Myth of Wartime Prosperity: Evidence from the Canadian Experience" (with Vincent Geloso).  Social Science Quarterly. 104(4): 377–394.


2022 - "Preferential Attachment and Carl Menger’s Theory of the Endogenous Emergence of a Medium of Exchange". Cosmos and Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization. 10(5+6): 47–60.

Working Papers:

Is Deflation Cause For Panic? Evidence from the National Banking Era.


Rethinking Deflation and its Effects: Lessons from Canada Under the Classical Gold Standard                          (with Bryan Cutsinger)

Works in Progress:

The Potlatch as Memory

Abstract: This paper uses a decentralized exchange model with costly but endogenous recordkeeping in order to study the gift-giving norms embedded in the Potlatch – a sophisticated cultural institution traditionally practised along the Pacific Northwest. Through this, it is highlighted how these gift-giving norms played a beneficial social role as an alternative to monetary exchange. I further outline how the ceremonial aspects of the Potlatch supported the necessary recordkeeping or “memory” for gift-giving to be sustained. Given these welfare-generating properties of the Potlatch, I also consider the effects of legal action taken to suppress it.


Reaffirming the Wheat Boom: New Evidence for Structural Breaks in Canadian Economic Growth           (with Jamie Bologna Pavlik and Vincent Geloso)

Abstract: In the last years of the 19th century, Canada experienced a “wheat boom”. Since the 1960s, historians and economists have debated whether the boom meaningfully accelerated economic growth. A resolution has been elusive notably because of issues of data quality regarding growth in the decades before the boom and the assumptions of the counterfactual scenarios drawn to evaluate the causal effect of the boom. We use newly corrected national output data alongside previously unavailable econometric tests such as synthetic control methods to break the deadlock. We find that there was indeed a structural break in growth in the late 19th century. We also are able to state that this break was unique to Canada and that it explains 36% to 40% of the growth observed during the period – an estimate that is closer to the most optimistic ones in the literature.

Recent and upcoming talks/events: