Violent conflict is a global phenomenon with devastating costs to individuals and their communities. Government experts and policymakers have responded with efforts to reduce violence and make peace. Such efforts are often implemented from the top-down, however, and are consequently limited in...

What is the relationship between education and peace? While economists have written about the relationship between education and economic prosperity and about how economic trade and prosperity affect peace, in this paper we highlight a different and more direct connection between education and...

Social life can take on a variety of forms – some violent, others peaceful. One type of social arrangement that is especially conducive to peace are friendships, that is, relationships based on mutual trust and dependence. The market is one important but often neglected space where we can...

Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues in The Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University in Bloomington conducted fieldwork in metropolitan police departments across the United States. They found that small police departments with a high degree of community involvement were...

Henry Hazlitt was a public intellectual who had unusual strength in both economic reasoning and articulation and played a central role in communicating the ideas of classical or ‘orthodox’ economics to the general public. He occupied a unique position in the mid-20th century intellectual...

The compelling case offered by Austrians regarding the recent economic downturn has no doubt encouraged many to take a closer look at the broader Austrian perspective. Similarly, the jobless recovery has prompted some soul searching in labor economics. We briefly review the history and...

Carl Menger published his classic work Principles of Economics in 1871, that work is the founding text of what came known as the “Austrian School of Economics”. That label has now been used to describe a historical school of thought, as well as contemporary academic economists and public...

Carl Menger published Principles of Economics ([1871] 1976) 150 years ago in 1871, and he died 100 years ago in 1921 at the age of 81. Yet, what Joseph Schumpeter said of Menger after his death we could argue is still true today, “Menger is nobody's pupil and what he created stands”...

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...