Investigations of national competitiveness aim to trace the causal mechanisms behind patterns in wealth and poverty across societies. This paper argues that to be productive such investigations must be comparative, historical and political economic in nature. Comparative historical political...

Introduction / Paul Dragos Aligica, Christopher J. Coyne, Stefanie Haeffele -- Explorations and extensions -- Rawls, Buchanan, and the search for a better social contract / Brian Kogelmann -- Horses & carts and justice & rules : getting the order right / Benjamin Johnson -- The problem of...

National defense is the textbook example of a public good. In order to understand how economists present public goods to undergraduates, we analyze 50 texts from across three widely taught undergraduate economics courses: principles of economics, intermediate microeconomics, and public finance....

Although Adam Smith’s 1776 Wealth of Nations is often cited as marking the birth of economics, it was really not until after the second world war that economics became the distinctive, more or less unified, and largely separate discipline summarised in the textbooks of today. Even a mere...