We examine whether corporate corruption scrutiny affects corporate investment in China. A corruption news index (CNI) containing firm-specific measures of corruption scrutiny is developed by tracking all articles in the press about corruption for all firms trading on the Shanghai and Shenzhen...

Armed with a set of economic theories and a desire to influence policy and improve lives, behavioral economists have developed a doctrine variously referred to as libertarian, light/soft, or asymmetric paternalism, and a series of policy proposals collectively referred to as the nudge agenda. To...

Imperial China used an empire-wide system of examinations to select civil servants. Using a semiparametric matching-based difference-in-differences estimator, we show that the persecution of scholar-officials led to a decline in the number of examinees at the provincial and prefectural level. To...

This paper combines insights from Ludwig von Mises about the mixed economy and Vilfredo Pareto about non-logical action within a social system to explore some intertemporal dynamics of an entangled system of political economy. Mises explained the inherent instability of the mixed economy. Pareto...

F. A. Hayek's macroeconomic theory and policy ideas have gained renewed attention since the recent boom-and-bust cycle followed the basic Hayekian narrative of an unsustainable cheap- money boom ending with a crash. Only to a very limited extent, however, do we find Hayek's ideas on the agenda...

This essay sketches the central features of Gordon Tullock's (1922-2014) contributions to law and economics. My reference to Tullock as a “maverick scholar” is to indicate that he stood apart from the mainstream of law and economics scholarship as this is represented by Richard Posner's...

The opening lines of F.A. Harper's 1951 article, "In Search of Peace," read as follows: "Charges of pacifism are likely to be hurled at anyone who in these troubled times raises any question about the race into war. If pacifism means embracing the objective of peace, I am willing to accept the...

Attempting to find the technically optimal monetary policy is futile if the Fed's independence is undermined by political influences. Nobel Laureates F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan each sought ways to constrain and/or safeguard the Fed from political pressures over their...

We consider a canonical two-period model of elections with adverse selection (hidden preferences) and moral hazard (hidden actions), in which neither voters nor politicians can commit to future choices. We prove existence of electoral equilibria, and we show that office holders mix between...

We study the extent to which people are misinformed about their relative position in the income distribution and the effects on preferences for redistribution of correcting faulty beliefs. We implement a tailor-made survey in Sweden and document that a vast majority of Swedes believe that they...