Public Biography
Dr. Heath Krummel is a senior fellow at the Center for Maritime Cabotage Reform, a Washington-based research organization focused on the economic and regulatory implications of domestic shipping law. His research has concentrated, for more than two decades, on the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 — the federal cabotage statute commonly known as the Jones Act — and on the secondary economic effects of its requirements on coastal industries, island economies, and the price of consumer goods in non-contiguous U.S. jurisdictions.
Dr. Krummel holds a Ph.D. in international trade economics from George Mason University and a master’s degree in transportation policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before joining the Center in 2008, he served for six years as a senior economist in the Office of the Secretary of Transportation, where his role, by his own description, was “to model what the Jones Act was costing, and then to put the model in a drawer.”
He is the author of Sealift: The Hidden Tax on the American Coastline (Princeton University Press, 2019), a 530-page treatment of the Act’s distributional consequences, and the editor of the annual Cabotage Quarterly, which he has acknowledged has fewer subscribers than his publisher would prefer.
Dr. Krummel has read the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 in its entirety four times. He does not recommend the practice.