This essay discusses Jon Michaels’ thoughtful and thought-provoking new book, Constitutional Coup: Privatization’s Threat to the American Republic (Harvard, 2017). In the book, Michaels recommends not only that we apply the brakes to the outsourcing train, but that the very future of our...

This article examines how letters of marque could be revived to effectively empower the private sector to assist governments in dealing with modern piracy. It examines Somali piracy, the development and different uses of letters of marque and privateers, the current legal framework relating to...

Privatization of government services has been touted as a cost-savings approach for state agencies, promising to harness the efficiencies of market forces to overcome the perceived inefficiencies of bureaucracies. Empirical and anecdotal evidence indicates that such savings rarely materialize,...

We examine how the U.S. Federal Government governs R&D contracts with private-sector firms. The government chooses between two contractual forms: grants and cooperative agreements. The latter provides the government substantially greater discretion over, and monitoring of, project progress....

The privatization literature depicts the choice whether to contract out as a tradeoff between excessive private investment in quality-reducing cost saving and inadequate public investment in cost-increasing quality improvement, under circumstances where neither the amount of investment nor the...

A common argument against privatization is that private providers will self-interestedly lobby to increase the size of their market. In this Article, I evaluate this argument, using, as a case study, the argument against prison privatization based on the possibility that the private prison...

US military Research and Development (R&D) expenditures arguably represent the best example of mission-oriented policy. They are sizeable, with a clear-cut public purpose (national defense) and with the government being their exclusive beneficiary. Exploiting a longitudinal dataset linking...

Many supply contracts between the state and private agents in a developing country are cost-re-imbursement variety and are rolled out under weak and unreliable governance. The latter has to be provided for through higher supply cost. The state in turn can lower the contract cost by providing...

The popular view is that the debate on privatization is about cost and efficiency. This was true at one time when most of the discussion involved battling theories concerning markets versus social and economic justice issues. At the extreme, those who advocated privatization argued that markets...

In a privatization competition, private contractors bid against an in-house team to perform a governmental function currently performed by the in-house team. The Department of Defense initiated 3,500 privatization competitions from 1978 to 1994, generating annual savings of $1.46 billion. We...