What governs central bank decisions? Most considerations focus on motivations. Instead, we consider the extent to which specific behaviors have adaptive value in the context of central banking. From this perspective, poor decisions are not the product of poor motivations. They are, instead, a...

Rafael Correa’s presidency in Ecuador (2007 – 2017) exemplifies left-leaning populist regimes in Latin America. However, there is a key difference: Ecuador is a dollarized economy. This removes the possibility of fiscal dominance over monetary policy as is common in populist regimes. This...

We develop a theory of self-enforcing monetary constitutions. A monetary constitution is the framework of rules within which money-providing and money-using agents interact. A self-enforcing monetary constitutions is upheld by the agents acting within the system; it thus does not require...

Politics, like any social process, involves selection mechanisms that determine whether the outcomes of the process are efficient. This paper presents a model of politics as an evolutionary process. The decisions of interest groups to enter politics determines the selected policy. Our model...

Why does the use of personal protection equipment (PPE) differ across countries? I develop a simple model and then offer several hypotheses. While the primary objective is to explain cross-country differences, the model suggests potential reasons for within-country and time-series variation, as well

The standard economic approach to considering the effects of a policy tends to neglect the prospect of regulatory ambiguity. I describe four sources of regulatory ambiguity and survey the literature considering the effects of ambiguity on entrepreneurial activity. I also explain how...

In The Curse of Cash, Kenneth Rogoff lists reductions in criminal activity and tax evasion among the primary benefits of eliminating cash. We maintain that, to the extent that individuals are interested in purchasing illicit goods and services or evading taxes, eliminating cash will encourage...

The emergence of bitcoin poses an important question for monetary theorists: can bitcoin compete with or even replace existing fiat monies? To answer this question, one must be able to determine what gives intrinsically useless monies their value, what determines the coexistence of alternative...

We provide an initial assessment of the Federal Reserve's policy response to the COVID-19 contraction. We briefly review the historical episode and consider the standard textbook treatment of a pandemic on the macroeconomy. We summarize and then evaluate the Fed's monetary and emergency lending...

We consider the essential features of an Austrian macroeconomic model and then ask whether these features are unique. We argue that the temporal aspect of the structure of production is not an essential feature. Malinvestments in any dimension (e.g., time, geography, type, etc.) can generate the...