Though many people consider Portland, Oregon, a model of 21st-century urban planning, the region's integrated land-use and transportation plans have greatly reduced the area's livability. To halt urban sprawl and reduce people's dependence on the automobile, Portland's plans use an urban-growth...

Some people are concerned that existing market structure regulation and liquidity incentives have skewed financial markets in favor of algorithmic and high-frequency trading (HFT). This type of market activity involves the use of computer programs to automatically trade securities in financial...

As described in Ronald Coase's seminal 1959 paper, property-like rights in electromagnetic spectrum and a secondary market for spectrum licenses will allocate spectrum to its highest and best uses, to the benefit of telecommunications consumers. However, defining rights to use spectrum is far...

Prodded by a centralized planning and budgeting process, the U.S. Forest Service's expensive, one-size-fits-all approach to wildfire does not fit the extremely diverse 193 million acres of national forests. The agency's program - which consists of spending close to $300 million per year treating...

Conventional wisdom holds that the United States is a country nearly evenly divided between two political ideologies: liberal vs. conservative, red state vs. blue state. Our study of voter and public polling data suggests this view is incorrect; a significant portion of voters can be classified...

In recent years, both academics and public commentators have alleged that "income inequality" is increasing in the United States. These commentators typically cite federal income tax return data to support their claims. However, studies based on tax return data provide highly misleading...

Happiness research studies the correlates of subjective well-being, generally through survey methods. A number of psychologists and social scientists have drawn upon this work recently to argue that the American model of relatively limited government and a dynamic market economy corrodes...