The most sophisticated monetary and banking policy advice available in the decades after 1776was found in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Smith recommended free competition amongnationwide banks of issue with only minimal legal restrictions and no legal privileges. Yetneither Alexander...

In the first edition of the Wealth of Nations, published in London in 1776, the author-works list is presented in a very unusual place: directly opposite the table of contents. That placement suggests a continuity and unity in Adam Smith’s published works. A photograph provides a touchstone to...

This paper explores U.S. government activities related to human experimentation after World War II. We emphasize how a proactive foreign policy, even in the pursuit of liberal ends, can undermine the rights and liberties of members the domestic populace. The typical primary justification for a...

We examine how salience of extreme actions to gain access to vaccines affect general vaccine preferences. To do so, we use a survey experiment conducted shortly after a limited supply of COVID-19 vaccines were made available to prioritized groups. We find that learning about people who jump the...

I explain two features of Adam Smith’s ethical thought, Smith’s organon and Smithian allegory. Smith’s organon is that inside of every moral sentiment there lurks a sympathy—that is, for any moral sentiment that a person has, there is another being who shares that sentiment as a...

Recent research has documented a rise in income and wealth inequality to levels not observed since the Gilded Age. This paper argues that focusing on income inequality trends masks gains in relative welfare over time. For a given a distribution of income, welfare differences among different...

We report the results of an online experiment studying preferences for giving and preferences for group-wide redistribution in small (4-person) and large (200-person) groups. We find that the desire to engage in voluntary giving decreases significantly with group size. However, voting for...

We investigate the impact on perceived and actual employability when job candidates signal different personal tastes for competitions. Using three experiments, with over 2000 participants in total, we show that candidates who are not willing to compete at all risk being perceived as less...

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the wheat oriented agrarian economy of Lower Canada (the French-speaking modern-day province of Quebec) saw a rapid collapse in wheat production dubbed the “wheat crisis.” In a single decade, Quebec went from being an exporter of wheat to an...

According to Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps (2013, p. 123), Mises’s critique of economic calculation under socialism renders him the originator of the economic analysis of property rights. This paper also suggests that implicit to Mises’s impossibility theorem was also the origins of the...