This short essay is a memorial piece about William A. Niskanen (13 March 1933- 26 October 2011). The essay starts with his time at the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s, and gives most attention to his contributions to public choice. Especial attention is paid to his Bureaucracy and...

A sample of 299 U.S. economics professors responded to our 2010 survey, which asked: “Suppose you are reading or listening to an economist, and he discloses his own ideological proclivities. Which best represents your attitude toward his doing so:” The results surprised us. Sixty-three...

The power of agenda setters is often raised when teaching parliamentary rules in political science and public choice classrooms. Most students do not have a frame of reference to understand the topic, and fail to internalize it. This paper describes a classroom experiment putting students in the...

Rationales for government interventions in the market are typically based on theories of market failure set within a framework of fixed private-sector practices and technologies. However, continuous technological progress and entrepreneurial innovation are eroding the theoretical foundations of...

In the classical economic view of markets a third party is needed to create and protect property rights. This should make black markets where the government actively opposes rights in the goods and services traded impossible, yet we see functional black markets across the world. We argue that...

This paper analyzes the constitutional history of China, with the aim of explaining how and why the policies that produced its rapid growth came to be adopted. The paper argues that constitutional reforms played important roles in China's economic development and are likely to do so in the...

One’s ideological views – that is, the pattern of positions one tends to take on important public-policy issues – run deep and change little. Inevitably they involve commitments and judgments about the most important things. Just as we value disclosure of vested interests, we value...

The literature on political business cycles follows two analytical conventions: (1) polity is reasonably reduced to a single agent who is either opportunistic or partisan and (2) economy is an equilibrated entity that is subject to politically inspired shocks. This paper pursues a different...

Holländer (1990) argued that when non-monetary social approval from peers is sufficiently valuable, it works to promote cooperation. Holländer, however, did not define the characteristics of environments in which high valued approval is likely to occur. This paper provides evidence from a...

The Federal Communications Commission's Network Neutrality Order regulates how broadband networks explain their services to customers, mandates that subscribers be permitted to deploy whatever computers, mobile devices, or applications they like for use with the network access service they...