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Douglas Ward Allen (born August 15, 1960) is a Canadian economist and the Burnaby Mountain Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University. He is known for his research on transaction costs and property rights, and how these influence the structure of organizations and institutions. His research covers four broad areas: transaction cost theory, economic history, agricultural organizations, and the family.

Allen's most cited academic work is "What Are Transaction Costs?" Here Allen notes that economists traditionally had thought of transaction costs as mere frictions to market transactions. The problem with this conception is that these types of costs are purely neoclassical, and fail to violate the Coase Theorem. Allen brought together ideas in the property rights literature with those of transaction costs, to define transaction costs as those costs incurred from establishing and maintaining economic property rights. When these costs are zero, the Coase Theorem holds, when they are positive, the Coase Theorem fails. These ideas are elaborated on in the third edition of "Economic Analysis of Property Rights" (2023) (with Yoram Barzel).

Allen wrote extensively about venal and patronage institutions in pre-modern England, and this work culminated in the book "The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic emergence of the Modern World," which won the Douglass North book prize in 2014. Allen also did extensive work (along with Bryan Leonard) on homesteading in North America. This work led to the book "Why the Rush: An Institutional Economic Analysis of Homesteading and the Settlement of the West."

Allen wrote several papers on issues related to same-sex marriage between 2006-2017. In 2013 his work on the effects of same-sex parenting on children's educational outcomes received public attention. Using Canadian census data, he found that children of same-sex parents were less likely to graduate from high school compared to children from opposite-sex married families. His study also found that child educational success in same-sex households depended on the gender composition of the household, a finding similar to an earlier article by Allen, Pakaluk, and Price, which used the US census. However, Gates asserted these estimated differences disappeared when accounting for family stability.

In 2014, he testified as an expert witness in defense of Michigan's marriage laws. At the end of his four-hour testimony, plaintiff attorney Ken Mogill asked him: "Professor Allen, yes or no, are gays going to hell?" Allen replied: "Unless they repent, yes." Many in the press took this to mean that he believed that people who engage in homosexual acts will go to hell. Allen has stated he was only referring to Luke 13:3 where Jesus stated all will perish (regardless of sexuality) unless they repent, and that he would have given the same answer if the question had been "are economists going to hell?". The state of Michigan defended Allen's remarks, arguing that they did not taint the expert statistical conclusions he expressed in his testimony. The judge in that case, Bernard A. Friedman, subsequently overturned the ban and concluded that Allen's research, along with the research of Professors Loren Marks and Joe Price, on same-sex marriage represented a "fringe viewpoint" and accepted the use of snowball sampling as a legitimate statistical strategy.

Publications

• The Nature of the Farm (MIT Press, 2002)
• The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic Emergence of the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

References

1. "Douglas Allen wins award for The Institutional Revolution". News. Simon Fraser University. 2 September 2014. Retrieved 4 June 2017.
2. "Douglas W. Allen Resume" (PDF). Retrieved 4 June 2017.
3. Allen, Douglas (Fall 1991). What Are Transaction Costs? (PDF). Research in Law and Economics. Vol. 14. JAI Press. pp. 1–18. ISBN 1-55938-404-2.
4. Editorial Board (6 April 2014). "A mom and a dad". Deseret News. Archived from the original on April 8, 2014. Retrieved 4 June 2017.
5. Allen, Douglas (2013). "High School Graduation Rates Among Children of Same-Sex Households". Review of Economics of the Household. 11 (4): 635–658. doi:10.1007/s11150-013-9220-y. S2CID 35760538.
6. Allen, Douglas; et al. (June 2013). "Nontraditional Families and Childhood Progress Through School: A Comment on Rosenfeld". Demography. 50 (3): 955–961. doi:10.1007/s13524-012-0169-x. PMID 23161454. S2CID 36353022.
7. Gates, Gary J. (2015). "Marriage and Family: LGBT Individuals and Same-Sex Couples". The Future of Children. 25 (2). Princeton University: 67–87. doi:10.1353/foc.2015.0013. JSTOR 43581973. S2CID 146645073. Retrieved 2021-12-17.
8. Abbey-Lambertz, Kate (7 March 2014). "Gay People Are Going To Hell, Says Expert Witness In Michigan Gay Marriage Trial". Huffington Post. Retrieved 4 June 2017.
9. Baldas, Tresa (6 March 2014). "Mich. trial witness: Unrepentant gays are going to hell". USA Today. Retrieved 4 June 2017.
10. Hopper, Tristin (28 March 2014). "Canadian economist never knew he would become centre of a U.S. firestorm over his research on same-sex parenting". The National Post. Retrieved 4 June 2017.
11. "Deboer Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law" (PDF).
12. ^ "Douglas Allen CV" (PDF).

External links

• Douglas W. Allen's faculty page
• Douglas W. Allen publications indexed by Google Scholar

• Canadian economists
• 1960 births
• Living people
• Academic staff of Simon Fraser University
• University of Washington alumni