I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics at Creighton University and a Faculty Fellow with the Menard Center for Economic Inquiry. I earned my PhD in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at Texas Tech University and was a research assistant with the Free Market Institute. I have also been an English teacher with Eikaiwa Aeon, an English language learning school in Tsukuba City in Ibaraki, Japan. I received my B.S. in Economics from the University of Nevada, Reno, and M.A. in Economics, with a concentration in Applied Economics, from San Jose State University. I am originally from Las Vegas, Nevada.
My research interests center around historical political economy of Japan, macroeconomics, and institutional analysis. My current research project investigates the relationship the 1985 Plaza Accord had with the late 1980s real estate bubble in Japan using causal inference methods. Additionally, my ongoing research delves into the historical political economy of the Imperial Japanese state. I explore why aristocratic elites decided to adopt a constitution and how the pre–WWII Japanese constitutional monarchy achieved a brief period of democratic representation in the 1920s through the right of free association and assembly.