During the 1950s and 1960s, many economists were convinced that externalities were a cause of "market failures" -- because individuals are not capable of internalizing the costs their actions impose to others -- and therefore that the intervention of the state was necessary to allow an efficient...

Meir Kohn’s Exchange and Value claims that economics can be characterised around two opposed paradigms, the exchange and the value paradigms. In this paper, we apply this dichotomy to characterise the analyses proposed by economists in the field known as “law and economics”. We compare and...

Buchanan's work on the methodology of economics includes many references to externalities. Buchanan has emphasized that a subjective conception of economics, and a focus put on exchange rather than on choice, has implications on an analysis of externalities. In this paper, we analyze the reverse...