The COVID-19 outbreak prompted governments around the world to employ a range of emergency methods to combat the pandemic. In many countries these emergency measures relied heavily on police powers, which refer to the capacity of governments to forcefully regulate behavior and impose order as...

One of the most popular measures of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) is an index based on newspapers coverage of particular keywords. The constructed index is often then included in VAR models to examine the extent to which EPU affects economic activity. Researchers, however, have not...

Democratic institutions aggregate voters’ preferences about policy options and thereby help determine which policies are implemented. Previous research has, however, suggested that such institutions can also have a direct, positive effect on cooperative and efficient behavior. In a laboratory...

Public health is an oft-used illustration of market failure and of the necessity of governmental action to overcome such failure. Covid-19 is just the latest in a continuing series of claims of market failure that are alleged to require solution by politically selected experts. Without doubt,...

It is common for scholars to describe institutions as “rules of the game.” This description entails a separation between a society and its rules. Social change thus results as societies amend their framing rules. This paper explores that common treatment of institutions as rules with a...

On regular issues of policy reform—presupposing a stable integrated polity— Hume, Smith, and Burke were liberal in the original political meaning of “liberal.” Thus, on policy reform, although they accorded the status quo a certain presumption (as any reasonable person must), the more...

We interpret Adam Smith on reputation, commutative justice, and defamation laws. We address two major questions. The first question concerns whether Smith thought that “one’s own” as covered by commutative justice included one’s reputation. Several passages point to the affirmative. But...

Analytical anarchism is a subset of political economy that takes neither rules as given nor assumes that monopoly enforcement of such rules exists. This approach is the positive study of endogenous rule formation by individuals within a particular society. Such rules emerge out of the...

Virginia Political Economy (VPE), one of the main branches of Public Choice, is often if not always associated with the names of a few scholars, the leaders of a school in economics. It is particularly significant that these scholars never worked alone. At the University of Virginia, where it...

In addition to using physical walls the United States government has attempted to restrict movement across the U.S.-Mexico border by constructing “virtual walls.” Virtual walls involve applying advanced surveillance and detection technologies to border enforcement. The U.S. government has...