Gerald Scully has been with the School of Management, University of Texas, Richardson, Texas since 1985. In the past 10 years, his focus has been on measuring inefficiency, examining the roles of institutional technology and policy on growth and equity, and other issues in public choice and constitutional political economy. The work on inefficiency is related mainly to the effects of different property rights regimes and issues of vertical integration and multinationality. He has shown that the extent of economic freedom and the rule of law are preconditions for a high rate of economic progress in the Third World.
In public choice and constitutional political economy, his main contributions have been on the theory of rent-seeking, the political market for income redistribution, the measurement of the trade-off between equality and efficiency, estimates of the effect of the distribution of rights on economic efficiency and equity, further work on the theory of the rule space and economic growth, and on estimates of growth-maximizing tax rate for the advanced industrial countries.