John V.C. Nye holds the Frédéric Bastiat Chair in Political Economy at the Mercatus Center and is Professor of Economics at George Mason University. He is a specialist in European economic history and the New Institutional Economics. He has done research on a variety of topics from firm size in France and the rise of the British fiscal state to Soviet collusion in championship chess, demography and superstition, and problems of reform in developing nations.
He is the author of War, Wine, and Taxes: The Political Economy of Anglo-French Trade 1689-1900 (Princeton, 2007) and was co-editor with John Drobak of Frontiers in the New Institutional Economics (Academic Press, 1997). He received an M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University and a B.S. in Physics from Caltech.