Andrew Samuel, Ph.D.

Professor of Economics, Loyola University MD

Welcome! I am Professor of Economics in the Sellinger School of Business and Management at Loyola University Maryland and former chair of the department (2019 - 2022). Previously, I held the France-Merrick faculty scholar (endowed research chair) in economics (2016 - 2019) and will do so again from July 2023 - .

Very broadly, my research lies at the nexus of law, economics, and institutions. It consists of two (related) themes:

Theme 1 focuses on law, regulation, and industrial organization. Not in the traditional anti-trust sense. Rather, I am interested in examining whether and how competitive forces interact with a regulator's ability to enforce regulations and ensure firms' compliance with its regulations. Accordingly, my research attempts to answer two questions: (1) Do market forces and regulatory enforcement reinforce or crowd each other out? (2) What is the optimal type of monitoring or enforcement of regulations within a given market structure? I use game theory, micro-economic theory, and some empirical methods to answer these questions. An expanded research statement of these ideas can be found here. Another useful overview of my research on inspections can be found at this talk I gave at the Food and Drug Administration.

Theme 2 focuses on the economics of corruption. Corruption is often understood as the misuse of public office for private gain. One frequent manifestation of corruption is bribery – when an official accepts a bribe from a citizen to circumvent regulations, or when officials misuse their power to extort payments from citizens. Several previous papers study how to identify and eliminate such forms of corruption. I am also interested in studying how bribery relates to other forms of corruption such as nepotism and how these practices and norms concerning these practices evolved. Some interesting data on this that I have compiled may be found here.

Besides research I enjoy teaching undergraduate microeconomic theory, game theory and MBA statistics and strategy.