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Professor

Economics & Business

DANIEL K.N. JOHNSON has a PhD in Economics from Yale (1998), an MSc from the London School of Economics (1992) and a BSocSci Honors from the University of Ottawa, Canada (1991). His research focus is in technological change, with seventy published articles analyzing how knowledge is created and how it flows between people, in particular emphasizing how public policy choices and innovation/entrepreneurship affect smaller or more marginalized groups differently. For example, his long-term engagements in Brazil and India have focused on agricultural productivity, small-scale entrepreneurship and adaptive innovation. In contrast, he has also written about how the stock market responds to patent news by big technology firms. 

He has launched practical applications of his research as well, founding a handful of startups and serving as an advisor in many others within the environmental and education sectors. He is an active alum of both the LSE (serving as ºÚÁϳԹϒs advisor), and the Fulbright program (as a Senior Specialist in Myanmar in 2016, then as a reviewer for applicants to Specialist roster). He coauthors with students whenever possible, including at least 30 to date and enjoys projects that apply economic models to unusual questions including predicting Olympic medal counts (on which he did a TedTalk), explaining game show contestant behavior, exploring philanthropic behavior, measuring the impact of WalMart on home prices, and improving the marginal impact of microfinance lending programs.

In response to the College’s anti-racist agenda, he has been adapting his own research to center that priority. In 2022-23 he served as a visiting senior research fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute (part of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund) to support civil rights litigation and anti-racist policymaking in the US, and is pursuing several strands of that research currently.

 

Regular Classes

• EC151 Principles of Microeconomics
• EC152 Principles of Macroeconomics
• EC207 Intermediate Microeconomic Theory
• EC303 Research Methods II
• EC365 Economics of Innovation