Abigail Devereaux, assistant professor of economics and Institute for the Study of Economic Growth research fellow at Wichita State University’s Barton School of Business, was recently named a Public Choice and Public Policy Project Fellow by the American Institute for Economic Research.
Congratulations to all 21 individuals chosen as Public Choice and Public Policy Project Fellows. We all stand to benefit from their work. I’m especially excited to see the contributions of Abigail Devereaux. Her research and innovative thought leadership, as well as her numerous professional contributions, make her uniquely qualified for this exciting new AIER project.
The Public Choice and Public Policy Project was established Dec. 21, 2021 and is modeled on the success of the Sound Money Project. The project creates a network of scholars that will offer regular commentary and in-depth analysis on public policy using the tools of Public Choice Economics. The innovative scholars who make up this project seek to understand the reality of government decision making and the consequences those decisions have on the lives of everyone in society and to suggest alternatives to the romantic political notions that often dominate policy discussions.
I am honored to be named as a Fellow of the Public Choice and Public Policy Project. Public choice is a subfield of economics that applies economic theory to the political world. Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics, won for her work in public choice. We’re just starting to introduce public choice concepts in our economics pedagogy at Wichita State. I cover it in my Principles of Microeconomics course and much more extensively in my Economies in Transition course. I look forward to advancing Public Choice Economics alongside these incredibly talented, capable and accomplished scholars.
A member of the Barton School’s faculty since 2020, Devereaux is a frequently published scholar on the topics of Game Theory, Complexity and Computability Theory, Theory of Entangled Political Economy, Combinatorial Growth Theory and Systems Theory. She has published in the Journal of Institutional Economics, The American Economist, Review of Austrian Economics, Cosmos & Taxis and Journal of Private Enterprise.
She is also recognized as an effective classroom instructor and mentor as an Assistant Professor of Economics in the W. Frank Barton School of Business. Devereaux has earned several distinctions in her career and is also currently a founding member of the Entangled Political Economy Research Network, a research fellow at the Independent Institute and a Faculty Affiliate at the Ostrom Workshop. In 2021, Devereaux and her co-author Dr. Linan Peng received the Elinor Ostrom Award on for their work on China’s Social Credit System.
Devereaux received her bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s degree in mathematics from Boston University and a Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University. She won the Israel M. Kirzner award for her “Synecological Systems Theory: An Alternative Foundation for Economic Inquiry” written under the direction of Richard E. Wagner. Previously, she has been a PhD fellow at the Mercatus Center and a visiting PhD fellow at New York University’s Economics department and the Classical Liberal Institute.
