Walter Stover

I am a PhD candidate in economics at George Mason University, where I held a Mercatus PhD fellowship from 2022 through Spring of 2026. My research applies cultural economics and computational methods to study how cultural factors such as individualism shape economic behavior in novel and digital markets. My most recent work looks at a crypto bank run through this cultural economics lens and the lessons this has for understanding general run dynamics, as well as implications for financial fragility policy. I've also worked on exploring new measures of strategy similarity in evolutionary game theory, and I am currently building massively scalable simulations of limit order books using agent-based modeling.

Before returning to GMU for my PhD, I worked with the Policy Analytics team at the Mercatus Center from 2020 through 2022 on regulatory text analysis and a proposal for computational law using a new machine-readable regulatory format. Earlier, as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne, I analyzed the economic impact of Australia's regulatory corpus.