In his 1962 NBER volume, Growth of Industrial Production in the Soviet Union, Warren Nutter writes about how the study of the Soviet economy was hamstrung by official secrecy and misinformation. Western economists were forced to rely on what Nutter called “Marco Polo economics” or...

This paper explores James Buchanan’s contributions to urban economics and urban public finance. Buchanan never self-identified as an “urban economist,” so his contributions to the field tend to blend into his broader body of work on public finance and externalities. However, in a series of...