Traditional wisdom has long argued that copyright laws are necessary to ensure that expressive works, such as books, music, and films, are produced by deterring people from consuming them for free. Recently, a new method of financing expressive works has emerged, known as crowdfunding, where...

In recent years, many policymakers have pushed for a stronger international standard of copyright recognition and enforcement, as embodied in international agreements such as TRIPS. Proponents argue, in part, that stronger laws will encourage economic development in both developed and developing...

This paper attempts to understand how political entrepreneurs choose which policies to support. Two opposing camps of contemporary public choice place the weight on either the result of the choice of the rationally-ignorant median voter, or at the mercy of interest groups who capture regulation...

Economists often model the delicate relationship between production, innovation, and economic growth as a production function that exhibits increasing returns to scale (IRS). The existence of "knowledge spillovers" or "learning by doing" often implies conclusions about the optimal use of...

The most robust framework for understanding the evolution and consequences of copyright statutes in the United States is the dynamics of interventionism. I apply the framework of Kirzner's (1985) perils of regulation to the general revision of copyright law in 1976, and explore its effects on...

I describe an assignment for a history of economic thought (HET) course, "The Most Interesting Economist in History," modeled off of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. Students vote in head-to-head matchups between economic writers by era for whom they find to be more "interesting" and...

Public goods are traditionally classified according to an exogenous, technological definition of possessing the characteristics of nonrivalry and nonexcludability. This paper takes a more endogenous approach, where goods are defined by the political purposes that specific actors have revolving...

This paper models the relationship between innovation and sustained economic growth through as being mediated by institutions that calibrate a 'structure of technological production' analogous to capital-based models of the structure of production. Our framework discusses two types of capital:...

This paper presents an empirical account of the diversity of regulatory developments over the past fifty years, and provides a theoretical framework for understanding this diversity. We build upon the "varieties of capitalism" and the "regulatory capitalism" literatures which provide methods for...