It is often asserted that public goods either do not ‘exist', or that goods exist on some kind of vague spectrum between “purely public” and “purely private” goods. This is because of a conceptual muddling between public goods and private goods. I present a new conceptual framework for...

Economics, properly understood, makes sense out the complex web of historical relations that constitute reality, namely by utilizing economic theory. Economics without price theory is not economic theory, and measurement without theory isn't empirically meaningful. However, graduate students are...

How can transaction costs prevent effective monitoring of members in an organization? In this paper I test for a relationship between the cost of monitoring and free riding behavior within a religious organization by using a historical case study: the Cistercian Order in Ancien Regime France....

At the zip code level, I investigate drivers of adoption for converter boxes funded by the Digital Television Transition of 2005. I find that broadband adoption explains participation in the coupon program. In regression analysis, I include controls for over-the-air television households, coupon...

I examine cost forecasts for 49 fiber-optic and wireless networks funded by the Recovery Act. I find that grantees did not systematically underbid for projects. They did, however, underestimate and overestimate costs with nearly equal frequency, and escalate costs on average by 202 percent in...

We investigate the optimal shape of organizations to reduce embezzlement. In a stylized synthesis of a common pool resource and ultimatum game, agents move sequentially along an organizational architecture, can take a share of the available resources, and can choose to "blow the whistle", an...

This paper argues that NGDP targeting is unlikely to produce macroeconomic stability. Contrary to the policy objective, NGDP targeting can increase macroeconomic turbulence. DSGE models that prove the effectiveness of NGDP stabilization policy rest on two assumptions. The first assumption is...

The U.S. government's covert drone program is a defining aspect of its military strategy in its transnational “War on Terror.” We highlight a fundamental paradox with the use of drones to combat terrorism. The U.S. government justifies drones as an efficient method for weakening, and...

We study whether cities with Jewish communities grew faster than cities without Jewish communities in Europe between 1400 and 1850. We match data on city populations from Bairoch (1988) with data on the presence of a Jewish community from the Encyclopedia Judaica. Our difference-in-differences...

Economic theory contains a significant theoretical antinomy. Markets are thought to secure coordination in self-organized fashion. In contrast, polities are portrayed as securing coordination through planning and administration. Doing this is to commit what Mitchel Resnick (1994) calls the...