Thomas Romer

Thomas Romer is a Professor of Politics and Public affairs at Princeton University. He is also the Director of the school's Research Program in Political Economy.  Romer's research explores the interaction of the market and non-market forces that influence the allocation of economic resources. He taught at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Western Ontario, and has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Trade Commission, Stanford University, and the Institute for Advanced Study, and a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Romer pioneered methods to incorporate incentive effects of taxation on labor supply into voting models, which initiated political economy research on voting over tax policies. He developed the Romer-Rosenthal setter model, which considered public policies that were set by a combination of bureaucratic agenda control and voting, and he tested this model with empirical studies of school budget referenda in Oregon and New York. His work on the politics and economics of local governments’ taxation and spending behavior was awarded the Duncan Black Prize of the Public Choice Society. Other work has dealt with land use regulation, campaign finance, the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s, and the political economy of redistribution. His current projects focus on the political economy of federalism. He has served on the advisory panels of the National Science Foundation and on the editorial boards of the American Economic Review and Public Choice. Dr. Romer received his Ph.D. from Yale University.