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I joined the School of Global Studies at Arizona State University  in August 2005.  Click the link to visit my new home page.

I obtained my Ph.D. from the Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago in December 2002, specialized in economic development. I am now conducting post-doc research at the University of Chicago Law School with Ronald Coase, who won the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991 “for his discovery and clarification of the significance of transaction costs and property rights for the institutional structure and functioning of the economy.”

I am interested in economic sociology broadly defined, with special attention to the institutional structure of the economy. I am also interested in political sociology, social and cultural psychology, social theory, history of social thought, community development, and transition economies. My current research aims at bringing the new institutional economics into the current revival of economic sociology. My book, forthcoming from Routledge, is an exercise in the new institutional economic sociology. It investigates the rise of a market economy in a rural Chinese community, with a focus on three key economic institutions, the firm, the market, and property rights. Another project of mine explores the legacy of the Scottish moralists, particularly David Hume and Adam Smith. Their study on man and society is still acutely relevant for us today to understand how an increasingly global society and its interconnected economy operate. In addition, with Ronald Coase, I am working on a project to retrieve business contracts from the United States Bankruptcy Court in Chicago. The purpose of this study is to empirically check the role of contracts in coordinating business transactions against theories of the firm and contracting.