Economics as a social science is about exchange and the institutions within which exchange relationships are formed and transactions are executed. Yoram Barzel's contribution to economics and political economy reflect this focus on exchange and institutions. In this paper, I will sketch a theory...

Nicholas Vriend (2002) asked whether F.A. Hayek was an “ace,” and answered affirmatively. By “ace,” Vriend meant someone who worked with agent-based modeling. To be sure, Hayek could not have worked with agent-based models because that platform did not exist when Hayek was developing his...

All but one American state has some constitutional requirement for a balanced budget but few of them operate this way. Moreover, in 1979 the federal government enacted a public law that required a balanced budget by 1982. The law has not been repealed but neither have budgets become balanced....

Most theorists of public finance treat budgeting as a technical problem concerned centrally with projecting revenues and expenses. To the contrary, I treat budgeting as a political problem, with technical matters serving to obscure more than illuminate the political economy of budgeting. This...

Any competitive process selects among qualities possessed by the competitors, and with different processes selecting for different qualities. With respect to athletic competition, for instance, diving selects for different qualities than swimming. This paper compares electoral and market...

This paper reconceptualizes and unbundles the relationship between public predation, state capacity, and economic development from a constitutional perspective. By reframing our understanding of state capacity theory from a constitutional perspective, we argue that to the extent there is a...

Any competitive process selects among qualities possessed by the competitors, and with different processes selecting for different qualities. While the competitive form is universal, the substantive qualities that are selected depend on the particular environment within which competition occurs....

Analytical anarchism is a subset of political economy that takes neither rules as given nor assumes that monopoly enforcement of such rules exists. This approach is the positive study of endogenous rule formation by individuals within a particular society. Such rules emerge out of the...

This essay is a keynote address prepared for a conference on "Entangled Political Economy" sponsored by the Wirth Institute. In keeping with the conventions of such an address, I look both backward and forward while placing more emphasis on looking forward. In looking backward, I compare and...

Public finance entails two distinct research programs with incongruent hard cores. A scholar can work within both programs but not at the same instant because of that incongruity. One program sets public finance inside welfare economics. It received its canonical expression from Francis...