Michael Ryan

Personal website

Mike teaches courses at the undergraduate level including:
•    Economics in our Daily Lives (ECON 1020).
•    Principles of Microeconomics (ECON 2010).
•    Game Theory and Experimental Economics (ECON 2040), which explores how individuals and firms make strategic decisions, and uses experiments and simulations to test how people actually behave as compared to what theory predicts.
•    International Economics (ECON 3800), which surveys the fundamentals of international trade open economy macroeconomics.

At the graduate level, Mike has primarily taught Basic Economic Analysis (ECON 6010) for MBA/MPA/MDA and other non-economics graduate students, and International Economics II(ECON 6810), the second course in the Ph.D. sequence in international economics. 

His research centers on international economics, with a particular focus on multinational firm behavior, foreign direct investment (FDI), and the ways uncertainty shapes global production decisions. A significant portion of his work examines Japanese outward FDI, where he analyzes how multinational enterprises choose host-country locations across Europe, North America, and Asia. 

He has published extensively on the effects of policy uncertainty, real-options dynamics, and market integration on firm entry decisions—including how events such as EU enlargement, Brexit, and changes in trade agreements alter the risks and incentives facing Japanese and other multinational firms. 

His current projects include new empirical work on hysteresis in FDI, nested logit models of firm location choice, and the evolving geography of production networks in response to shifting global supply-chain and geopolitical pressures.

Mike's research has allowed him to teach and research throughout the world. He has served as a Visiting Professor at the universities of Kiel (Germany), Bamberg (Germany), and Otago (New Zealand). He was recently also a visiting scholar at Chuo University (Japan).