The MTSU Department of Economics and Finance will host professor Douglas W. Allen for a guest lecture at 7 p.m. Friday, Nov. 9. The event, which is open to the public, will be held in the College of Education building, Room 160.

Doug Allen, Burnaby Mountain Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, will give a guest lecture Friday at MTSU. (submitted photo)

Allen will give a lecture titled “The Institutional Revolution: What Happened to Dueling, Aristocrats, Indentured Servants, and the Town Watch?” Allen is Burnaby Mountain Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and his book “The Institutional Revolution” was published in 2011.

A review of the book posted on the University of Chicago Press Books’ website by the Times Literary Supplement stated the following:

“What are the connections among aristocrats, duels, private lighthouses and private police forces in the conduct of early modern economies? Douglas W. Allen in ‘The Institutional Revolution’ brings together a whole series of customs and behaviors we now associate with irrational premodern practices and shows the part they played as informal institutions to ensure the provision of civil service goods before the nineteenth century.”

The lecture will last about an hour, with 15 minutes afterward for questions.

The guest lectures are held twice per semester, said Mike Hammock, assistant professor in the Department of Economics and Finance. Their purpose is to convey to students the variety of topics that economists study and the sometimes counterintuitive ways that markets work, he said.

— Jimmy Hart (Jimmy.Hart@mtsu.edu)