An entrepreneur’s prior knowledge and experience play a critical role in his ability to identify and exploit entrepreneurial opportunities. Although entrepreneurship research has acknowledged the role that prior information and prior knowledge play in opportunity recognition, few studies have...

This Handbook looks through the lens of the latest generation of scholars at the main propositions believed by so-called ‘Austrians’. Each contributing author addresses key tenets of the school of thought, and outlines its ongoing contribution to economics and to the social sciences.

With the collapse of communism in the late 1980s the field of comparative political economy has undergone major revision. Socialism is no longer considered the viable alternative to capitalism it once was. We now recognize that the choice is between alternative institutional arrangements of...

The Ministry of Economic Development ran a series of seminars about economic growth in 2004. One was an economic history of economic growth in New Zealand, three were on different and sometimes contradictory conceptual ways of thinking about economic growth – endogenous growth theory, Austrian...

Ludwig von Mises and Israel Kirzner are two of the most prominent scholars who have attempted to gain a richer understanding of how the invisible hand operates in coordinating the vast array of economic exchanges that occur on a daily basis in the actual imperfect world. These economists, among...

Karl Marx perhaps the most astute student of economic doctrine, once made the famous and apposite observation that in substantial passages of "The Wealth of Nations" Adam Smith "was very copiously infected with the conceptions of the Physiocrats." In parallel fashion this paper agues that in...

For over a century, English husbands sold their wives at auctions. We argue that wife sales were an institutional response to an unusual constellation of property rights in Industrial Revolution-era English law. That constellation simultaneously required most wives to obtain their husbands'...