The paper presents comparative statics of organizational modes of natural monopoly in public utilities with a focus on co-ownership and co-governance. Private monopoly lowers output and increases price to maximize profit; public monopoly incurs higher costs due to the lack of know-how; and a...

This paper explains that James Buchanan's theory of public debt entailed more than the shifting of cost forward in time from the current generation of taxpayers to future generations of taxpayers. The possibility of such shifting is dubious, for public debt really entails a shifting of cost...

This paper uses the 19th century concern with “the social question” as a vehicle to explore how the theories we use can shape, for better or for worse, our insights into our subjects of interest. Contemporary thinking mostly channels the social question into a focus on inequality in the...

The present work estimates collected seigniorage levels in the Venezuelan economy from 1994Q1 to 2018Q2 and tries to determine when and if a seigniorage-maximizing inflation rate occurred and this way provide a rational on the development of hyperinflation in the country. Results suggest that...

National defense is the hard case for the voluntary provision of public goods because without recourse to taxation it is difficult to overcome the free rider problem, much less provide defense superior to that of government provision because of the tremendous costs associated with national...

What is the long-term impact of pre-colonial ethnic institutions? I examine the consequences of the fragmentation of local indigenous communities produced by Spanish rule in Mexico. To do this I make use of unique data from 18th century pueblos — the basis of modern-day counties — to study...

We develop a systematic, functional approach to revealed preference tests based on completing preferences. Our approach is based on the notion of sequential closure, which generalizes the notion of transitive closure. We show that revealed preference tests developed for various decision theories...

This paper examines the growing economic impact of MLB on the Dominican economy. After introducing the Dominican baseball experience, it examines the rapid growth of salaries paid to Dominican-born major league players and provides perspective on how the growth in those salaries relates to...

We argue in this chapter that the transformation in the vision of economics from one in terms of processes to one in terms of equilibrium would in turn yielded public policy implications regarding the role of government and distributive justice. Although classical political economists had made a...

Economists model state-provided defense as a value-added, public good. The actual government provision of defense, however, is a “black box” that is rarely analyzed. This chapter contributes to opening this black box by analyzing the U.S. defense budget. We provide an institutional...