His research in economic history concerns the development of living standards measures to assess how the human condition has changed over time.
[7] In a series of recent papers, he has studied the impact of Black politicians on the distribution of public finance and subsequent violence,[9] and disparate access to Union Army pensions[10] during the Reconstruction era.
In his presidential address to the NEA, Logan used records from his own family to talk about productivity and living standards in the Jim crow era in the American South, arguing for a greater role of qualitative research in driving the focus of empirical study.
In another project, with Manisha Shah and Chih-Sheng Hsieh, he studies the economic, social and health implications of male sex work.
This work examines the value of information in this illegal market, uses econometric techniques to quantitatively test sociological theories of gender and masculinity, and looks at the role of public health in causing decreases in disease transmission among these men.