I completed a PhD at the University of Western Australia. My thesis can be downloaded here, although some of the chapters that make up the thesis were published and are listed below.

Publications

“Economic Growth and Evolution: Parental Preferences for Quality and Quantity of Offspring” (2014) Macroeconomic Dynamics 18, pp. 1773-1796 (with Boris Baer and Juerg Weber) (ungated pdf): In this paper we look at the model developed in Galor and Moav (2002) Natural Selection and the Origin of Economic Growth. You can find a post describing the paper here.

Sexual Selection, Conspicuous Consumption and Economic Growth (2015) Journal of Bioeconomics 17(2), pp. 189-206 (with Boris Baer and Juerg Weber) (ungated working paper): We examine the effect of the evolution of conspicuous consumption on economic growth. You can read a post on my paper here. Coverage of the paper includes Tom Whipple in The Times, Sarah Griffiths in The Daily Mail, Rob Brooks in The Huffington Post and The Conversation, Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling, and Matt Ridley in The Wall Street Journal. And Paul Frijters has prepared a critique of an earlier version, which you can find here.

Sperm use economy of honeybee (Apis mellifera) queens (2016) Ecology and Evolution (with Boris Baer, Kristiina Maalaps and Susanne P. A. den Boer)

Economics in Evolutionary Biology: A Review (2016) Economic Record (with Boris Baer and Juerg Weber) (ungated working paper): A review of how evolutionary biology has been incorporated into economic thinking.

Working papers

Evolution, Fertility and the Ageing Population (with Oliver Richards): We hypothesise that because the heritability of fertility increased after the demographic transition, natural selection should drive an increase in fertility. This may affect projections of the fiscal effects of the “ageing population”. A post giving some background to the paper is here.

Population, Technological Progress and the Evolution of Innovative Potential (with Boris Baer and Juerg Weber): As more people means both more ideas and more mutations, we develop a dual-driver model of evolutionary growth in which both the increasing quantity and evolving innovative potential of the population drives economic growth. My post on the paper is here.