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Chinese historians speak of dynastic cycles where periods of economic progress and decline coincide with the rise and fall of families of rulers, while economists speak of societies without technical change or involuntary unemployment as evolving into stationary states. This paper alters the...

Through tax evasion, through the labour-leisure choice or in other ways, taxpayers reduce the tax base in response to an increase in the tax rate. The process is commonly-believed to generate a humped Laffer curve with a revenue-maximizing tax rate well short of 100%. That need not be so. In the...

A common, though by no means universally-accepted doctrine among practitioners of law and economics is that redistribution is no business of the law. This efficiency-only doctrine is not that redistribution is unworthy as a social objective, but that any given benefit to the poor is attainable...

We know that people strike bargains and that civilized life could not proceed otherwise. We do not know how bargains are struck. We have no explanation of bargaining, comparable to the general equilibrium in the economy, accounting for essential features of bargaining as we know it with...

From the Wealth of Nations to the present day, there has been a great cycle of opinion about the source of inefficiency, from Smith's sharp and unqualified contrast between private sector enterprise and public sector sloth, to Mill's qualified and reluctant allowance of large domains with the...

The marginal cost of public funds is the equilibrium price at the intersection of the appropriately-defined demand curve for and the supply curve of public expenditure. In a world with identical people and with no excess burden of taxation, that price would have to be 1. Otherwise the median...

Intensity of preference would be irrelevant to the outcome of public decision-making by majority-rule voting if each issue were resolved in a separate plebiscite. It is not irrelevant when issues are combined in platforms of political parties. Preference intensity can be represented as a...

This paper attempts to identify the costs and benefits of programs of firm-specific investment grants. The benefits arise from a divergence between private and social returns, such as might occur when new products are created or when workers are employed in depressed regions. The primary cost is...