Starting tomorrow, January 4, Econlog will have a new guest blogger. It is my pleasure to introduce Emily Skarbek.

Emily is a Lecturer in Political Economy at King’s College London. She earned her Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University in 2009. Her research examines the role of voluntary associations in solving complex coordination and public goods problems after natural disasters. Her interests center on how people achieve coordination in market relationships and the role of private governance in social organizations. Her work has focused on the economic analyses of crises and recovery using an interdisciplinary and mixed methods approach. She did extensive fieldwork in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and historical archival work on the Chicago Fire of 1871 and the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.

Emily has a passion for the history of economic thought, a passion that I observed up close in a conversation at a Liberty Fund event in the fall. She is particularly interested in the epistemic arguments of F.A. Hayek. More broadly, however, she thinks–and I agree–that the history of ideas can inform and further contemporary research.

She has had articles published in Public Choice, the Journal of Institutional Economics, and the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. In 2014, she was awarded the annual Gordon Tullock prize for best article published in Public Choice by a junior scholar. She is also a contributing author to several books. including After Katrina: The Political Economy of Disaster and Community Rebound and Hayek and the Modern World.

Here are links to her home page and her journal articles, book chapters, and working papers. Here is the link to her twitter account.