Vlad Tarko
- Associate Professor, Political Economy and Moral Science
- Member of the Graduate Faculty
Biography
My main research interests are political economy, institutional economics, and entrepreneurship. My papers, books and conference presentations currently fall mainly in two larger research projects: (1) The political economy and institutional theory of polycentric governance. (2) The performance of alternative capitalist systems and the problem of economic disequilibrium. In the first category, I am the co-author of one of the most widely cited papers on the history and definition of “polycentricity”, and I have several other papers that apply the concept to specific topics: democracy as co-production of rules, the institutions of the scientific community, ecological resilience, the resilience of the banking sector, the stability of the financial system, and federalism under highly imperfect Tiebout competition. In the second category, I have authored and co-authored several papers and a book on applying the rent-seeking model to understand different types of capitalism, methodology papers on how to use statistical methods to build taxonomies of economic systems and evaluate the consequences of constitutions, and theory papers on entrepreneurship, economic disequilibrium, the capacity for collective learning under alternative institutions, and the role of ideas in driving institutional changes.
I have published papers in American Political Science Review, Governance, Business and Politics, Comparative Economic Studies, Kyklos, Public Choice, Constitutional Political Economy, Journal of Institutional Economics, Review of Austrian Economics, and others. I’m the author of Elinor Ostrom: An Intellectual Biography (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), co-author with Paul Dragos Aligica of Capitalist Alternatives: Models, Taxonomies, Scenarios (Routledge, 2015), co-author with Paul Dragos Aligica and Peter Boettke of Public Governance and the Classical Liberal Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2019), and co-editor with Jayme Lemke of Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School: Building a New Approach to Policy and the Social Sciences (Agenda Publishing / Columbia University Press, under contract).
Degrees
- Ph.D. Economics
- George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States
- Polycentric Governance: A Theoretical and Empirical Exploration
Work Experience
- Dickinson College (2015 - 2019)
Awards
- General grant
- Charles Koch Foundation, Spring 2020
- Best book award for _Elinor Ostrom: An Intellectual Biography_
- The _Society for the Development of Austrian Economics_ at the _Southern Economic Association_ conference, 2018, Fall 2019
Interests
Research
varieties of capitalism, institutional economics, polycentric governance, constitutional political economy, public choice, economic disequilibrium, agent-based modelling
Teaching
microeconomics, economic development, institutional economics, comparative economic systems, public choice, entrepreneurship, history of economic thought
Courses
No activities entered.
Scholarly Contributions
Books
Chapters
Journals/Publications
- More infoAlthough Milton Friedman's mid-1970s involvement with Pinochet's Chile has generated much controversy, the claim that James M. Buchanan was similarly eager to provide Pinochet's military dictatorship with early 1980s policy advice is increasingly reported as an established fact in the vast scholarly literature on neoliberalism. This article invokes a wealth of previously ignored primary source material that sheds significant new light on Buchanan's early 1980s involvement with Chile. In particular, we evaluate whether Buchanan's May 1980 visit to Chile was an integral part of the Pinochet junta's late 1970s and early 1980s efforts to draft a new constitution. Similarly, we evaluate whether Buchanan's ideas had any significant influence on the views of Pedro Ibáñez and Carlos Cáceres (the most anti-democratic members of Pinochet's Council of State and the primary hosts of Buchanan's May 1980 visit to Chile). Finally, we shed important new light on Buchanan's participation in the highly controversial late 1981 Mont Pèlerin Society meeting in Chile.
