Full Biography

Joshua Ammons is an institutional economist who studies how regimes end and institutions begin, and what determines whether the result is an inclusive, durable order or a return to extraction under new management. He is Assistant Professor of Practice in Economics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

His research sits at the intersection of three traditions in institutional economics: the New Institutional Economics on the long-run consequences of political institutions, the Bloomington tradition on polycentric governance, and the constitutional political economy of the Virginia school. The program threads through four interlocking questions: the cultural and ideational substrates of legitimacy, the modes by which institutions undergo transition, the institutional aftermath those transitions produce, and the distributional incorporation of women and other historically excluded groups into the resulting order. Recent articles appear in the Small Business Economics, Journal of Business Venturing Insights, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Public Choice, Kyklos, and the Journal of Institutional Economics.

Ammons completed his Ph.D. in economics at George Mason University in 2024. From 2014 to 2024 he worked at the Institute for Humane Studies, where he designed and directed faculty and student programming at more than thirty universities, including research workshops, academic symposia, and reading colloquia. He held a Scholar in Residence appointment at the Stephenson Institute for Classical Liberalism at Wabash College from 2024 to 2026. He has taught international economics and international economic policy as a graduate lecturer at George Mason, and in Spring 2026 he taught How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life at the Putnamville Correctional Facility.

His work has been supported by the University of Pittsburgh's Governing Deep Differences Grant and an Institute for Humane Studies Educational Entrepreneurship Grant. He serves as a referee for the European Economic Review, Public Choice, Small Business Economics, Politics & Gender, the Eastern Economic Journal, the Journal of Institutional Economics, the Review of Austrian Economics, and other outlets. He earned his M.A. in economics from George Mason in 2019 and his B.A. in business administration from the University of Mississippi in 2014.