Mitchell Harvey is Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at the Hamilton School. Harvey is an economist specializing in Political Economy and Economic History. Mitch combines historical scholarship and archival sources with modern empirical and theoretical methods to explore the interplay between economic conditions, institutions and political behavior.
Mitch’s latest work, Financial Incentives and Institutional Change, studies the effects of a large financial crisis on Scottish politics between 1700 and 1707. Specifically, Mitch’s research explores how the Company of Scotland’s disastrous attempts to colonise modern-day Panama affected the 1702 Scottish election, the birth of a new parliamentary faction in 1704, and the 1707 union of Scotland and England to form a United Kingdom. Mitch is also working on a joint project Saumitra Jha that explores the impact of financial incentives on the willingness of the first US congress to support Alexander Hamilton’s financial plan.
In Historical Experiments in Finance, Mitch explores the 19th Century Australian banking system to derive empirical insights into the behavior of unregulated competitive currency. He is particularly interested in understanding the extent to which competition between banks had a self-regulating effect on bank lending behavior.
“Unexpected Politics: Do Interest Rates Influence Lobbying Expenditure?”, Conditionally Accepted at Public Choice
University of Florida
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