Over the course of three hundred years, the institutional organization of the Christian church evolved from small loosely organized groups meeting in house churches to a form of hierarchical organization known as monepiscopacy. Monepiscopacy denotes a form of ecclesial polity in which a single...

This paper applies Kirzner’s theory of entrepreneurial alertness to central banking. As opposed to entrepreneurs operating within the market, central banks can operate outside the market by defining its structure and regulations. We label as “super-alertness” the particular type of...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the political philosophy of John C. Calhoun from the perspective of Virginia Political Economy. Specifically, this paper argues that Calhoun's theory of the concurrent majority offers a way of operationalizing the "generality norm" of Buchanan and...

This paper presents a case study of the emergence of currency from a barter economy. We use this case study to attempt to shed light on the relative importance of various types of frictions that lead to the emergence of money in search-theoretic models of currency formation. In particular, our...

I present a theory of political property rights that serves as a complement to familiar Tiebout mechanisms in explaining governance outcomes. I argue that when the structure of political property rights is such that the polity most closely resembles a business corporation, governance will be...

This paper develops the theory of entangled political economy by outlining a process by which the political-economic order can become increasingly entangled. The theory posits that a Big Player polity organization, a key feature of which is a lack of a hard budget constraint, exports this...

This paper compares various proposals for monetary policy rules according to the standard of political economy. It first presents an argument for why rules-based monetary policy is preferable to discretionary policy. Next it discusses at a general level two kinds of rules: those that can be...