The link between crisis and permanent increases in public spending has been investigated from the perspective of interest groups, bureaucratic growth, etc., while a demand perspective, i.e. the question of changing voter preferences, has been ignored. Survey data suggests that individuals become...

Transition countries display generally low levels of public support for market economic principles during the 1990s-but more successful countries display more support than less successful countries. The attitude difference is not just the result of transition speed or success. Rather, the data...

In 2005 Hurricane Katrina posed an unprecedented set of challenges to formal and informal systems of disaster response and recovery. Informed by the Virginia School of Political Economy, the contributors to this study critically examine the public policy environment that led to both successes...

In this paper it is argued that locus of control beliefs and preferences concerning state action negatively affect the formation of new firms in former socialist countries. For this purpose Kirzner's theory of costless entrepreneurship is reviewed and criticized. German reunification, in which...

The authors explain why the elementary logic of rate-of-return regulation generates not the competitive outcome but the monopoly outcome. Within the framework of the "passive regulator" that this logic entails, public regulation cannot alter the monopoly outcome, but can only change the form in...

The Theory of Economic Equilibrium was written in the period of what George Shackle calls the “Years of High Theory”. Unlike the works that Shackle discusses, da Empoli’s volume received little attention and played no part in shaping the analytical formulations of the time. The Theory of...

Excess burden is used widely throughout public finance for both normative and positive analyses. Although it is generally treated as a universal quality of all but lump-sum taxation, the author argues to the contrary that it is not a universal quality of taxation but is at most a contingent...