Taking James Buchanan’s 1963 presidential address to the Southern Economic Association as our point of departure, we summarize some of the contributions to the literatures of economics and political science that responded over the next 50 years to his challenge to concentrate on “exchange”...

Do the antitrust law enforcement activities of the US Department of Justice act as exogenous "technology shocks", an essential element of real business cycle theory that hitherto has eluded direct empirical corroboration, or as "markup shocks" limiting market power and promoting economic...

This paper analyzes the editorial screening process in economics, employing data from the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Quarterly Journal of Economics. We examine three issues: the decline of critical commentary in economics, the increased referencing behavior of...

We examine the correlation between federal government activity and the performance of the D.C. area's National Football League team, the Washington Redskins. We find a significantly positive, non-spurious, and robust correlation between the Redskins' winning percentage and the amount of federal...

This paper suggests that, while medieval cathedrals served many purposes and, indeed, were some of the greatest technical achievements of their time, they served a rational economic purpose as well. Protestant entry into the market for Christian religion finally materialized in the early...

The American states have provided a rich laboratory in which to examine influences on economic growth, physical capital, human capital, and a variety of policy variables. Existing studies typically use broad cross sections of all states or particular regional subsamples. Pairwise matching is an...

We develop a simple insurance model of the secondary market for tickets to account for some of the observed spatial patterns of prices. Beyond ticket markets the model draws attention to the existence of subtle insurance fees in market prices that may be incorrectly attributed to breakdown of...

R-rated films are correlated with lower box office revenues. Using sex and nudity content as an instrument to predict R-ratings, we show that R-ratings themselves are not the cause of lower revenues. Instead, R-rated films contain traits that lower revenues and the ratings act as a signal of...