What factors caused the persecution of minorities in medieval and early modern Europe? We build a model that predicts that minority communities were more likely to be expropriated in the wake of negative income shocks. Using panel data consisting of 1,366 city-level persecutions of Jews from 936...

Communication between departments within a firm may include deception. Theory suggests that telling lies in these environments may be strategically optimal if there exists a small difference in monetary incentives (Crawford and Sobel, 1982; Galeotti et al, 2012). We design a laboratory experiment to...

This note forms the introduction to a book entitled: Individualism and Political Disorder. It helps to contextualize the rest of the articles in the book. The chapters in the book are papers written by James M. Buchanan, singly or jointly with Yong J. Yoon, after the publication of his collected...

Ronald Coase wrote the 1949 memo that guided the discussion of the Fabian Research Group on broadcasting. In the evidence presented to the Beveridge Committee on broadcasting, the Fabians endorsed his recommendations by and large. These two facts have previously escaped notice and, as a result,...

The governments of American states often attempt to incentivize businesses to locate within their borders by offering targeted benefits to particular industries and companies. These benefits come in many forms, including business tax credits for investments, property tax abatements, and...

Although few academic economists today endorse a gold standard, historical data show that actual gold standards have outperformed actual fiat standards in at least five respects: (1) lower mean inflation rate, hence lower deadweight cost of economizing on money balances; (2) lower price level...

In bringing economic analysis to bear on whether a dispute is settled without trial, the presumed institutional setting is typically one of private property where the parties are residual claimants to their legal expenses. Many disputes, however, are between private and public parties. In these...

In randomized control laboratory experiments, we find that those primed to think about markets exhibit more trusting behavior. We randomly and unconsciously prime experimental participants to think about markets and trade. We then ask them to play a trust game involving an anonymous stranger. We...

In this paper we estimate the long-run effects of prenatal exposure to the 1918/19 influenza wave for a European country. Using data from the 1970 Swiss census and comparing cohort outcomes, we find that the male Swiss-born cohort with in utero exposure to the pandemic performs significantly...

Over 25% of the US population volunteers. Clary et al. (1998) devised a survey that identifies a volunteer’s primary motive for volunteering. We investigate the effect of tailoring the communications that volunteers receive from their organizations (e.g., printed newsletters, update emails) to...