Dustin Frye

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. My research combines urban economics and economic history, examining how public policy, infrastructure, and institutions shape economic development, health, and long-run spatial outcomes.

Research Areas

• Economic geography of US transportation networks
• Historical urban infrastructure and its long-run consequences
• Federal Indian policy and reservation economies (1880–present)

A unifying feature of my work is original data construction — assembling new historical datasets from census microdata, land patents, infrastructure maps, and administrative sources. My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and has been published in journals including the Review of Economics and Statistics and the Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics.

I received my Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Colorado Boulder and my B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Montana. Prior to joining UW–Madison, I was an Assistant Professor at Vassar College.