Born
February 18, 1939, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Current Position
Professor, Economic and Politics, Claremont Graduate University, 1983-.
Past Positions
Associate Professor and Professor of Economics, Simon Fraser University, 1973-1983; Visiting Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, 1979-1980; Visiting Professor of Law and Economics, University of Toronto, 1968-1979; Post-doctoral Fellow, Hoover Institution, 1974-1975; Associate Professor of Economics, Virginia Polytechnic Institution, 1971-1973; Assistant Professor, University of Washington, 1966-1971; Post doctoral Fellow, Thomas Jefferson Center for Study of Political Economy, University of Virginia, 1965-1966.
Degrees
B.A., University of Cincinnati, 1961; Ph.D., Duke
University, 1966
Offices and Honors
Phi Beta Kappa, 1961
Mont Pelerin Society, 1985
Listed in Who’s Who in Economics: A Biographical
Dictionary of Major Economists (1700-1998).
Listed in Who’s Who in America.
Editorial Duties
Co-Editor, Managing Editor, and Senior Editor, Economic
Inquiry, 1980-1997.
Principal Fields of Interest
Public Choice and Political Economy; Public Economics;
Sociological Economics.
Selected Publications
Books
1. Budgets and Bureaucrats: The Sources of Government Growth, (ed.) (Duke University Press, 1977).
2. The Egg Marketing Board: A Case Study of Monopoly and Its Social Costs (The Fraser Institute, 1981).
Articles
1. "The demand for the services of non-federal governments." American Economic Review, 62 (December): 1972 (with R.T. Deacon).
2. "The economics of school integration: public choice with tie-ins." Public Choice, Fall(31):1977.
3. "Why do all the good apples go east? Alchian and Allen’s substitution theorem revisited." Journal of Political Economy, February(76):1978 (with E. Silberberg).
4. "Expropriation of private property and the basis for compensation." University of Toronto Law Journal, Summer:1979 (with J. Knetsch).
5. "Comparing the efficiency of private and public production: a survey of the evidence from five federal states." Zeitschrift fuer Nationaloekoenomie/Journal of Economic Theory: Public Production (edited by D. Boes et al.), Supplement: 1982.
6. "The causes of government expenditure growth: a survey of the U.S. evidence." Journal of Public Economics, December: 1985.
7. "Organizing government supply: the role of bureaucracy," in F. Thompson and M. Green (eds.) Handbook of Public Finance (Marcel Dekker, 1998) (with A. Khursheed).
8. "Market power and stable cartels: theory and empirical test." Journal of Law and Economics, 44 October: 2001 (with D. Filson, E. Fruits and E. Keen).
9. "Group consumption, free riding and informal reciprocity agreements." The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Spring:2002 (with D. Filson).
10. "The growth of real government," in R. Wagner and J. Backhaus (eds.) Handbook of Public Finance (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2003) (with S. Ferris and A. Garzoni).
Principle Contributions
Thomas Borcherding’s research has been concerned with the role of institutions in economic, political, and social choice. He considers himself a Virginia School economist, and uses middlebrow microeconomic theory to analyze a diversity of topics from the growth of government, the behavior of bureaucrats, the evolution of desegregation politics, the social costs of conscription, the operations of legal rent-seeking cartels, to his most recent work on group consumption without formal rules, and conflicts of interest in the Hollywood film industry. Borcherding’s current work is concerned with the theory of investments in social capital, the political choice between regulation and fiscal instruments, and the effects that reduced deadweights of broad-based taxes have on the size of the public sector.
