This paper first discusses the origins of the military-industrial complex in the United States. We then explore several ways that public choice economics can illuminate our understanding of the military-industrial complex. Specifically, we focus on the following issues. Defense contractors...

Public finance entails two distinct research programs with incongruent hard cores. A scholar can work within both programs but not at the same instant because of that incongruity. One program sets public finance inside welfare economics. It received its canonical expression from Francis...

The British Conquest of Quebec in 1760 was a key moment in Canadian history as it marked the beginning of a tense coexistence between French and English Canadians. Many argue that the Conquest had strong economic consequences in the form of the relative poverty of the French settlers. The...

The colony of Lower Canada, now the modern-day province of Quebec in Canada, is presented as having experienced a prolonged agricultural crisis (marked by the shift away from wheat-farming) during the first decades of the nineteenth century. During this crisis, living standards supposedly fell,...

The political economy of medieval Europe was shaped by alliances between lords and vassals, forged through peaceful and violent means. We model coalition formation through bargaining or by conquest, and where members can rebel against their coalition. We derive conditions under which a realm...

Automated Market Makers (AMMs) are a relatively new mechanism that allow people to trade cryptocurrencies instantly. Unlike typical centralized trades that utilize order-books, AMMs are decentralized, so they do not require the matching of buyers and sellers for exchanges; rather, they use a...

This paper provides a series of nominal non-war output for Canada during WWI and WWII and a novel estimated price deflator to account for wartime price controls. We argue that our nominal series, deflated by our price estimates, provides a superior indicator of welfare and general economic...

This essay treats entangled political economy within the history of political economy. It explains that entangled political economy is not so much a new development in economics as it is a revisitation of some old themes that were swept aside in the conversion of political economy into economics...

Efficient diffusion of economic information plays a critical role in the functioning of society, and, more specifically, households. We study information diffusion between spouses in a representative sample of the German population. We focus on an important economic belief: the household’s...

Existing scholarship examines the moral status of markets, identifying some markets as “noxious”—markets deemed morally objectionable due to the background conditions preceding exchange and the resulting consequences. This literature primarily focuses on market exchanges between private...