This paper studies the long-run fiscal consequences of balanced budget rules (BBR) that are enshrined in a country's constitution. Using historical data dating back to the 19th century and applying a difference-in-difference approach we find that the introduction of a constitutional-BBR reduces...

U.S. military contracting has been plagued by systematic corruption, fraud, and waste during both times of peace and war. These outcomes result from the inherent features of the U.S. military sector which incentivize unproductive entrepreneurship. The military sector is characterized by an...

This article introduces Buchanan's comment on Tiebout's "A Pure Theory of Local Public Expenditures". It helps us to understand the nature of the relationship between Buchanan and Tiebout. Usually, it is claimed that Buchanan modeled Tiebout's insights, that there exists a Buchanan-Tiebout...

Philanthropy, and particularly ensuring that one's giving is effective, can require substantial time and effort. One way to reduce these costs, and thus encourage greater giving, could be to encourage delegation of giving decisions to better-informed others. At the same time, because it involves...

This essay stems from Jim Dorn's invitation to encapsulate my recent book, Politics as a Peculiar Business: Insights from a Theory of Entangled Political Economy (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2016). Where standard political economy treats states as singular entities that intervene into...

The business cycle theory of Friedrich A. Hayek offers an explanation for the onset of the Great Depression that is more complete than those of his contemporaries, including Gustav Cassel. Hayek sought to explain why the boom of the 1920s ended in the bust of 1929. In the 1930s, Hayek's theory...

This paper explores the interventionist mindset required for success under the U.S. government's foreign policy strategy of liberal hegemony. This approach to foreign policy contains an inherent tension. Its adherents claim a commitment to liberal values but successfully implementing the...

In Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life, Edward Stringham explains that private ordering is sufficient to secure full exploitation of gains from trade within a society. After describing the logic of Stringham's claim on behalf of private ordering, the remainder of this...

Following Richter (1966), we provide criteria under which a preference relation implied by a finite set of choice observations has a complete extension that can in turn be represented by a utility function. These criteria rely on a mapping over preference relations, the rational closure, which...

Personal debts are obligations that people establish through agreement among one another, so it is easy to understand the general objection to defaulting on debts. Can such objections be reasonably extended in robotic fashion to public debts within democratic regimes? While a common piece of...