The rise of the “New History of Capitalism” as a subfield of historical studies has magnified differences between economists and historians which started to grow during the 1970s. We describe what is and what is not new about the “New History of Capitalism,” and explain how the different...

It is a little-known fact that Canada adopted its own antitrust laws one year before the landmark Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The Anti-Combines Act of 1889 was adopted after a decade in which ‘combines’ (the Canadian equivalent of ‘trusts’) grew more numerous. From their numbers,...

Coase's publication of “The Lighthouse in Economics” (1974) sparked a polarizing debate over his claim that government intervention is not necessary for the existence of a private lighthouse market. The purpose of this paper is to reframe this debate by asking the following question: why was...

To what extent are the outcomes of economic regulation intended and desired by its proponents? To address this question, we combine Stigler’s theory of regulatory capture with the Austrian theory of the dynamics of interventionism. We reframe Stigler’s theory of regulatory capture as an...

In this paper, we consider whether or not inequality forces society to expend more resources on supervision which imposes an extra cost to doing business. Some argue that since inequality deteriorates social capital, there is a greater need for supervisory labor which is a costly burden to bear....

We assess the effects of changes in household size on the long-run evolution of living standards and on cross-country convergence. When the observed changes in average household size across countries are taken into consideration, growth in living standards is slower throughout the 20th century...