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Institutions Matter: Can New Jersey Reverse Course?
by Eileen Norcross and Frederic Sautet
Citation: Norcross, Eileen and Frederic Sautet. “Institutions Matter: Can New Jersey Reverse Course?” Mercatus Center at George Mason University (August 2009), http://newjersey.mercatus.org.
About the authors:
Eileen Norcross is a senior research fellow with the Social Change Project and lead researcher on the State and Local Policy Project. Her work focuses on how societies sustain prosperity and the role of civil society plays in supporting economic resiliency. Her areas of research include fiscal federalism and institutions, tax and fiscal policy, urban economics, and economic development. She has testified before Congress on several occasions on topics such as the use of performance budgeting, the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, and the use of technology to monitor stimulus funding. A co-founder of the website StimulusWatch.org with fellow Mercatus scholar Jerry Brito, she is also interested in the impact of technology on social change.
She blogs on state and local issues at http://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/.
Before joining Mercatus, Ms. Norcross was the 2001-2002 Warren Brookes Fellow in Journalism at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. While there, she focused on trade, regulatory, and tax policies affecting the European Union and the United States. Previously, Ms. Norcross worked for KPMG as a consultant with their transfer pricing division and as a research analyst with Thompson Financial Securities Data.
A native of New Jersey, Ms. Norcross earned her Masters in economics from Rutgers University in 1996. She graduated summa cum laude from Rutgers University in 1993 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and U.S. history.
Her research papers include, The Community Development Block Grant: Does it Work?; The Road Home: Helping Homeowners in the Gulf Post-Katrina, coauthored with Anthony Skriba; and From BIDs to RIDs: Creating Residential Improvement Districts, co-authored by Robert Nelson and Kyle McKenzie. She has co-authored several Mercatus On Policy briefs covering tax incentive policy in New Orleans and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Her work has been cited in numerous media outlets, and her op-eds have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, Forbes, and the New Jersey Star-Ledger.
Frederic Sautet is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a member of the graduate faculty at George Mason University.
Prior to joining Mercatus, Dr. Sautet was a senior economist at the New Zealand Commerce Commission and a senior analyst at the New Zealand Treasury where he focused on industrial policy, entrepreneurship, utility development, and tax policy. Dr. Sautet’s current work focuses, among other things, on entrepreneurship, institutions, and social change.
Dr. Sautet is the co-author of Action ou Taxation (published in 1996 by Editions Slatkine, Geneva, and co-edited with Philippe Lacoude), An Entrepreneurial Theory of the Firm (published in 2000 by Routledge, London), and the senior editor of the Mercatus Policy Series. His writings in economics have been published or are forthcoming in Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice, The Independent Review, Le Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines, The Review of Austrian Economics, The New Zealand Law Journal, International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal, and other scholarly publications. He is a contributor to the Handbook of Research on Clusters, The New Handbook on Austrian Economics (Peter Boettke, ed.), and Making Poor Nations Rich: Entrepreneurship and the Process of Development (Benjamin Powell, ed. with a foreword by Deepak Lal). He also has many publications on policy issues in the Mercatus Policy Series, the New Zealand Ministry of Economic Development Occasional Paper Series, the New Zealand Business Roundtable policy papers, and other outlets. Dr. Sautet has consulted with many government agencies, international organizations, and policy institutes, including the New Zealand Ministry of Economic Development, the New Zealand Business Roundtable, the French government, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and Excellence in Government. He is also a coauthor of The Austrian Economists weblog.
Dr. Sautet earned a doctorate in economics from the Université de Paris Dauphine and did the course work for his doctorate at the Institut des Etudes Politiques in Paris. He also studied at New York University under the auspices of Prof. Israel Kirzner and Mario Rizzo as a visiting scholar and post-doctorate fellow.
The authors wish to thank Emily Washington for her assistance with this paper. Nothing in this paper should be construed as being an official position of the Mercatus Center or of George Mason University.
Can New Jersey Reverse Course? v1.2