In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world adopted a variety of policies expanding the scope of their power. Some of these effects are immediate and observable. Others, however, are not readily observable and only appear over time. We explore these long-run consequences...

The Black Death was the largest demographic shock in European history. We review the evidence for the origins, spread, and mortality of the disease. We document that it was a plausibly exogenous shock to the European economy and trace out its aggregate and local impacts in both the short-run and...

What is the relationship between central planning, pervasive shortages, and soft budget constraints under socialism? In this paper, we address this question by exploring the evolution of János Kornai’s work on the operation of real-world socialism. In doing so, our goal is to reframe...

A large and growing literature investigates the effects of economic policy uncertainty on various measures of economic activity. Virtually all of it concentrates on the modern era. We show that estimates based on post-WWII data likely suffer from an attenuation bias because the modern-period...

I have been asked to explore how James Buchanan’s work on public finance and constitutional political economy might have emerged out of themes present in Frank Knight’s oeuvre, especially his Risk Uncertainty, and Profit. Buchanan’s body of work has inspired the development of a style of...

Before political and jural integration, multiple, non-integrated jural authorities contended with each other for influence and authority. It was a world of plural jural superiorities, or jural pluralism. In Hume’s History of England, the main characters in the story of jural pluralism and the...

The present 77 page document is my set of notes used in a five-part reading group on Larry Siedentop's great book Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. The document contains a link to the set of videos online

In a recent edition of Economic Affairs, Edwin van de Haar provides evidence against the thesis that trade fosters peace. However, I argue his description of the “trade-fosters-peace” thesis as insufficiently precise is incorrect. By its nature, we must use probabilistic language....

Gordon Tullock (1922-2014) took only one academic degree, a J.D. from the University of Chicago in 1947. He leveraged that degree into a polymathic career where he made significant contributions to economics, law, political science, history, and biology, among other disciplines. Tullock was a...

Recently a credibility crisis has taken hold across the social sciences, arguing that a component of Fischer (1935)’s tripod has not been fully embraced: replication. The importance of replications is not debatable scientifically, but researchers’ incentives are not sufficient to encourage...