Michael D. LaFaive is director of the Mackinac Center’s Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative in Midland, Mich., and has been associated with the Center for 15 years.
LaFaive has both undergraduate and graduate degrees in economics from Central Michigan University. He is the author or co-author of 6 major studies, dozens of essays, and other papers at the Center on topics as diverse as economic development, school finance, privatization, and the state budget. His 127-page study, “MEGA: A Retrospective Assessment” (co-authored with Center adjunct-scholar Michael Hicks, Ph.D.) remains the most exhaustive review of Michigan’s premier economic development program.
His 182-page 2003 state budget study provided the only explicit set of alternatives to hiking taxes in the state of Michigan that year, and served repeatedly as a source of ideas for legislators and other opinion leaders and policy professionals during the state budget debates in the past five years. LaFaive has also developed the only annual school support service privatization survey in the nation. In recent years he may be best known for his use of outbound migration statistics to underscore Michigan’s economic woes.
In his spare time LaFaive enjoys baseball, mountain biking, fly fishing, and studying history and economics. He is currently reading Peter Eisenger’s “The Rise of the Entrepreneurial State.”
