ABOUT ME

I am originally from Jackson, Mississippi. While I have always had scholarly inclinations, my interest in academia peaked when I fell in love with economics as a high school student at Northwest Rankin High School. Soon after, I began my undergraduate career with the International Business Program at Mississippi State University. I received a Bachelor of Business Administration in Business Economics and a Bachelor of Arts in German. During my time at Mississippi State, I had the privilege of traveling to Germany twice and working with Germany Trade and Invest as a Service Industries Intern for a small time. 

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After my undergraduate program I began work as a Ph.D. student and Mercatus Center Fellow, and Graduate Lecturer at George Mason University. There, my early work focused on how immigration impacts entrepreneurship in both home and host countries. From the home country perspective, I analyzed how remittances impact business creation in receiving countries in a 2023 article published in International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business. From the host country perspective, I have studied the entrepreneurial propensities of both first- and second-generation immigrants in work published in The Journal of Private Enterprise and in work forthcoming in the American Entrepreneurship Journal.

 

I now live in Denmark and work at Copenhagen Business School as a Postdoc in Entrepreneurship at the Department of Strategy and Innovation. There, I work in close connection with the Mærsk McKinney Møller Chair in Entrepreneurship, Dr. José Mata. I have extended my previous research program by studying how immigration restrictions impact entrepreneurship in the host country. At the macro level, I have a working paper that examines the impacts of quotas and other immigration restrictions on host country entrepreneurship rates. At the micro level, I am working on a piece that shows how restrictive foreign citizenship worsens the entrepreneurial prospects of immigrants using large-scale Danish registry microdata.

 

My research interests currently focus on entrepreneurship, with a special emphasis on immigrant entrepreneurship. However, I have a diverse set of research interests which also include public choice and political economy, economic development, culture, the economics of crime, law and economics, the economics of non-violent action, polycentric systems, Austrian economics,  and applied microeconomics.   

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Besides academia, I have a number of other hobbies. I am a big fan of sports, artistic gymnastics and American football being my two favorite. When I have a little more free time, I also enjoy riding my motorcycle cross-country. I've been a number of cool places, including Niagara Falls, the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains, and California State Route 1 along the Pacific Coast. Now that I'm in Denmark, I've switched to a motorless two-wheel vehicle and enjoy taking advantage of all the bicycle paths available. I also am a lover of music and like to enjoy my vinyl collection. Finally, I have always enjoyed traveling and seeing new places, and I love to take trips with my awesome fiancée, Amberly Dozier.