Erik Matson

Affiliate Faculty

History of economic thought; economics and ethics; economics and theology.

Erik Matson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center. He works with Professor Daniel Klein to lead the GMU Adam Smith Program. He teaches, additionally, as a lecturer in political economy in the Busch School of Business at The Catholic University America.

Erik has published widely in academic journals on eighteenth century British moral philosophy and political economy, focusing on Adam Smith and David Hume. In 2024 he published a monograph on behavioral paternalism with the Institute for Economic Affairs: New Paternalism Meets Older Wisdom: Looking to Smith and Hume on Rationality, Welfare, and Behavioural Economics. He is currently working on a two-volume project on the history of Christian economic thought, which he is co-authoring with Jordan J. Ballor, and an introductory monograph on nineteenth-century American economic and intellectual history.

From 2018-2020, Erik was a Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University. Before that, he earned his MA and PhD in economics at George Mason University.

Selected Publications

Matson, Erik W. 2024. "Hume on the Protestant Ethic and the Rise of English Commercial Spirit." Journal of the History of Economic Thought. 46(3): 443-465.

Matson, Erik W. 2023. “Commerce as Cooperation with the Deity: Self-Love, the Common Good, and the Coherence of Francis Hutcheson.” European Journal for the History of Economic Thought. 30(4): 507-524.

Matson, Erik W. 2022. “What is Liberal about Adam Smith’s ‘Liberal Plan’?” Southern Economic Journal. 89(2): 593-610.

Matson, Erik W. 2022. “Our Dynamic Being Within: Smithian Challenges to the New Paternalism.” Journal of Economic Methodology. 29(4): 309-325.