The growing number of commercial and consumer drones, combined with their ability to fly quietly at low altitudes with cameras and other monitoring equipment, raises concerns about privacy and property rights. How will the balancing of privacy concerns and the interests of drone operators...

At present, bitcoin is held mostly as a speculative vehicle, little used to pay for goods and services. Its value has been unstable, which impedes bitcoin’s wider use as a payment medium. We explain why the value of bitcoin has been so unstable. Then, we discuss entrepreneurial efforts that...

Entrepreneurship is the economic source of change in society. While it is ubiquitous, its particular qualities depend on the system of political economy in which it operates. We distinguish between two systems of democratic political economy. One system is the classically liberal system where...

Consider a decision maker who has to choose one of several alternatives, and who is imperfectly informed about the payoff of each of them. In each period, the decision maker has to decide whether to stop and take one of the alternatives, or to continue researching the alternatives. New...

What role do whistleblowers play in democratic politics? This paper answers this question by analyzing the political economy of whistleblowing within democratic political institutions. Democratic politics is characterized by numerous principal-agent problems creating significant space for...

Game theory holds out the promise of transforming the core of economic theory from ascience of rational choice into a science of human interaction. While traditional gametheory does open into social interaction, it mostly neglects another central feature ofeconomic intuition: spontaneous...

Nicholas Vriend (2002) asked whether F.A. Hayek was an “ace,” and answered affirmatively. By “ace,” Vriend meant someone who worked with agent-based modeling. To be sure, Hayek could not have worked with agent-based models because that platform did not exist when Hayek was developing his...

We describe Peru's experience of chronic inflation through the 1970s and 1980s as a result of the need for inflationary taxation in a regime of fiscal dominance of monetary policy. Hyperinflation occurred when further debt accumulation became unavailable, and a populist administration engaged in...

Social preferences have been implicated in many important economic behaviors. Building on Fehr and Schmidt (1999), we here investigate connections between social preferences and the demand for information about others' economic decisions and outcomes, which we denote “social curiosity.”...

I study the link between the choice of rule-based contracts and political competition through the municipal bond market. I provide evidence that when the probability of losing office is high, mayors are more likely to issue revenue bonds over general obligation bonds and to choose competitive...