I study the business practices of the Comédie française, the main theater in Paris, between 1680 and 1793. The theater was an actors' partnership and operated within a (contested) oligopoly. Newly available data provide revenues by price category for over 32,000 performances. Attendance varied...

Many argue that income mobility is declining. This applies to all types of income mobility (relative and absolute; intergenerational and intragenerational). As remedies, those who worry and others who want to improve mobility tend to propose expansions to welfare programmes. We argue that...

A market economy can nurture good human attributesIn the thirtieth IEA Discussion Paper, Philip Booth examines the moral limits to the market economy. Christians often express concerns about the way in which self interest in the market economy can become disordered or bent and thus manifest...

Modern welfare states undermine human flourishingIn the thirty-first IEA Discussion Paper, Professor Philip Booth explains how modern welfare states and high levels of public debt undermine human flourishing. His arguments are presented in the context of Catholic social teaching.Professor Booth...

Postliberalism has emerged as an influential ideology, especially on the political right. Its leading figures include Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule in the U.S. and Philip Blond and Nick Timothy in the U.K. Postliberals claim that liberalism has caused the woes of the contemporary West. They...

This paper relates the political decision-process which allowed Germany to transform its planned economic system into a Social Market Economy after the Second WorldWar. The central problem of the paper is to understand how the Social MarketEconomy emerged in Germany. Was it primarily an imported...

This short paper reviews the economic-historical literature on ancien régime French guilds and suggests some paths for future research.

Economic development is the result of various factors operating in space and time. For some time now, economics has been looking more closely at the role played by institutions as a driving and propelling force behind economic development. More recently, the action carried out by intermediate...