Dr. Ezekiel Nichols

Working Paper: The Elasticity of Demand of Cocaine. My next working paper is a structural vector autoregression of the DEA's trafficking interdiction on the price of cocaine and methamphetamine. The preliminary results show that the DEA raises the price of cocaine almost as much as real disposable income per capita. An amazing amount. Real disposable income raises the price of cocaine through the effect on the demand curve. The income effect.

There's not a lot of research in the area of illegal drugs but as my thinking developed, I realized that understanding illegal drugs is really about understanding markets. If there's not a market for a drug it is not much of a problem. The SVAR uses a macroeconomic model traditionally used for monetary policy to examine the effect the DEA has on raising the price though trafficking seizures. I also realized that I could get data by filing FOIA requests with the DEA. They have an amazing amount of data on illegal drugs it's just a matter of 1. If they will give it to you and 2. Can you deal with messy data that has nonrandom sampling properties.

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For my five-year plan, I am going to start submitting papers on illegal drugs to peer reviewed journals for publication, which should get published as there's a huge interest and not much research in this area of my expertise. I have figured out how to use the principal component scores from temperature data in Colombia as an instrument for cocaine variables, giving new life to a lot of publicly available data. I just got a new data set on drug labs from the DEA and have started to get results. After that, I plan on moving to a university and publishing my entirely fictional account of a story I made up.

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I am a Roman Catholic convert. I joined the church on Holy Saturday of 2011. I earned a Ph.D in economics from the University of Alabama in 2013 and worked in private industry for 8 years. First, as a Senior Analyst for the now defunct Sears Holdings Corporation in Chicago then as the Forecasting Analyst for Walmart call center in Springdale, AR.

The woman to the right of me is, my wife. She is my inspiration. Second to God, she is the love of my life. Our biggest struggle is when she has me help her with her hair. She is turning the big 30 this week so everybody with Tiera a happy birthday.​​​​

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Below is some art from Death Row Inmates in Alabama, 25.9% of Alabama's population is African American and 48.8% of people on death row in Alabama are African American. Given those two numbers and the number of men and women on death row the probability that so many African-Americans would be on death row would be 18/10,000. Would you bet that Alabama isn't doing something racist if the odds were 18/10,000?

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Finally, I am helping an inmate who is serving 25 to life for a non-murder conviction make some commissary money. He makes custom Christmas cards. I ordered enough to give everyone of my coworkers a custom card for Christmas. I asked him to add the little part about himself. You can choose to have that added or not. The cards are $15 each. I would suggest getting 2 - 4 and having the ups store print out a mass production of your Christmas cards. Contact me at nicholsezekiel@gmail.com if you are interested. Pictures to the right and below.