Company Profile
The Mercatus Center at George Mason University
Company Overview
The Mercatus Center at George Mason University is the world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas—bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.
A university-based research center, the Mercatus Center advances knowledge about how markets work to improve people’s lives by training graduate students, conducting research, and applying economics to offer solutions to society’s most pressing problems.
Our mission is to generate knowledge and understanding of the institutions that affect the freedom to prosper, and to find sustainable solutions that overcome the barriers preventing individuals from living free, prosperous, and peaceful lives.
Founded in 1980, the Mercatus Center is located on George Mason University’s Arlington and Fairfax campuses.
Company History
A university-based research center dedicated to bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems, the Mercatus Center has been a source of innovative scholarship about how the world works since its founding more than thirty years ago.
As part of Virginia’s largest university, Mercatus supports graduate students in George Mason University’s world-renowned department of economics. Now in our fourth decade, former students who have benefited from Mercatus support are among the most creative scholars working at the intersection of economics and problem solving.
Mercatus research draws from a distinctive tradition of political economy, blending ideas developed by Nobel Laureates F.A. Hayek, James Buchanan, Elinor Ostrom, Vernon Smith, and Douglass North, and applying them to address society’s most pressing problems.
Mercatus brings this research along with faculty from universities around the country to Washington, DC to educate public policy makers about how economics can help them address important public policy challenges.