While entrepreneurs benefit from unrestricted free entry into markets, they have a time-inconsistent incentive to lobby for government entry restrictions once they become successful. Bad political institutions yield to these demands, and growing barriers are placed on domestic and international...

The special interest group model of government, employed throughout public choice theory, models the outcomes of government as a function of special interest group activity. Early work in this area by authors such as Stigler (1971) and Peltzman (1976) focused on the role of interest groups in...

This paper examines how closely the minimum wage has been set to the most popularly stated goals of minimum-wage policy. I first estimate these goals: the minimum-wage rate at which the relevant labor demand is unitary elastic--maximizing the total earnings of minimum-wage workers (about...