If you are curious about my research interests, here are short descriptions of the two main fields to which I devote my time.

I. Regional Science This field draws researchers from a variety of disciplines, but probably close to half are economists. In economics, we usually call the field “urban and regional economics.” The field focuses on the spatial aspect of economic activity.

The Regional Science Association International is the umbrella organization for those who do regional science anywhere in the world. The field has a dozen or so journals; here are two examples:

· Journal of Regional Science is the oldest and perhaps most prestigious journal in the field. The link gives access to full-text articles for computers located on the MTSU campus.

· Journal of Regional Analysis and Policy is an open-access journal, published by the Mid-Continent Regional Science Association.

A very nice resource that can teach you a lot about regional science is the Web Book of Regional Science, published by the Regional Research Institute, at West Virginia University. Regional scientists sometimes do theoretical work: producing formal mathematical models that explain how economic activity is structured in space. More often they do empirical work: examining the actual patterns of spatial structure, and attempting to tell the story of how that spatial structure came to be. Empirical work involves using some very cool research tools:

· Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are computerized information systems for spatial data. Once your data are located in space, you can perform a variety of analyses based on proximity of units to each other. You can also make nice maps! Like most folks, I use ArcGIS, but there are also some nice open-source options.

· Spatial econometrics applies the tools of econometrics to phenomena with known location in space. There are some nice open-source tools in R; there is also a nice suite of tools written for MatLab.

II. Economic Anthropology My interest in this field stems from my experience as an undergraduate, where I had a great course in economic anthropology. In graduate school, I studied the work of Thorstein Veblen, who believed that anthropology could provide economics with a realistic view of human behavior. I still believe that anthropology has much to teach economics, but it is also true that economics has much to teach anthropology.

Society for Economic Anthropology This is the main professional organization for economic anthropology. For more information, see the Wikipedia entry. The field currently lacks a focused journal, but the following two publications often print articles that pertain to economic anthropology:

· Current Anthropology is one of the most interesting journals in the social sciences, with a unique format in which the main articles are followed by comments from scholars knowledgeable about the topic. The link gives access to full-text articles for computers located on the MTSU campus.

· Structure and Dynamics is an open-access journal that publishes interdisciplinary social science articles, most of which have enough mathematical sophistication to interest economists. The general editor is Douglas R. White, who has many interesting resources on his website, and manages a wiki devoted to interdisciplinary social science.

Economic anthropology addresses some fascinating “big-picture” questions, such as the causes and consequences of the Neolithic revolution (about 10,000 BP), or the upper Paleolithic revolution (about 50,000 BP). Most economic anthropologists are “materialists” and examine the ways in which a society’s economic base conditions other features of the society’s culture.

My own research in economic anthropology usually involves applying tools that I have learned in regional science. I am particularly interested in the ethnographic database called the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. These data can be used to test many hypotheses about the sources of cultural differences (here is an example). Analyzing these data requires the use of spatial econometric techniques to mitigate what is called Galton’s problem (here’s another paper on Galton’s problem). In some other work (done with Christa Jensen, a former student) I have used regional science methods to look at how village markets attract itinerant vendors in Guatemala. I hope to apply some of the other methods I’ve learned—such as social network analysis or data envelopment analysis—to ethnographic data, as well.

But I am also interested in trying to apply some ideas from anthropology to regional science. So far, my main effort has been an attempt to explain urban land use patterns in a way that might come close to satisfying Thorstein Veblen.