Introduction During the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, a great deal of literature was devoted to the virtues and deficiences of the general property tax and its proposed replacements — a system of land value taxation, or the more extreme...

Introduction The case of broadcast television has long presented economists with a paradox: The broadcast television signal is in the nature of a privately‐provided public good, for which exclusion costs are presumably prohibitive and marginal costs are zero (i.e., once a television signal is...

INTRODUCTION During the past dozen years a relatively large theoretical literature has grown out of the models proposed by Averch‐Johnson (2) and, to a lesser extent, Wellisz (90). Averch‐Johnson (here‐after A‐J) pointed out the now famous overcapitalization effect‐that a monopoly...

The 1969 Food and Drug Administration ban on the calorie‐free chemical sweetener cyclamate has received widespread comment from scientists, consumers, and politicians. This attention has focused on product safety, not on industry losses and regulatory costs. In contrast, the following analysis...

There are really only two schools of thought in economics—the right wing and the wrong. I mean that in the semi‐serious sense that meaningful statements about economic issues must be supported by logic and evidence, and not just by credentials and authority. The idea that economics is just a...

Due largely to the discussion arising from the Hunt Commission of the early 1970's, bank — thrift institution competition continues to be one of the most controversial topics currently under study. For all the heat the debate has generated, there has been little new light shed on the problem....

By the criterion most beloved by the economics profession, economists have not failed; on the contrary, we are a glorious success. The criterion I am referring to is, of course, that of success in the marketplace. The marketplace continues to value our output highly. The profession is growing at a...

Previously, there have been few attempts to explore fully the concept of monopoly as it existed prior to the eighteenth century. The concept of monopoly as presently defined, namely that situation where there exists only one seller in the market, could not be applied evenly to monopolies...

If everyone were indifferent between more and less and between this and that, the problems of allocating scarce resources would be trivialized. The necessity of choice, whether social or individual, would seem absurd. However, people persist in preferring certain “states of the world” to...

To find the way to obtain the maximization of social welfare has been a focus of welfare economics. Pareto optimal conditions are usually considered a sufficient condition for the Welfare maximization, i.e., the first best solution. Under the mixed economy, however, it is almost impossible to...