The decline of political efficacy and political trust in the United States is often linked to the rise of money in politics. Both the courts and reform advocates justify restrictions on campaign donations and spending as necessary to restore faith in government. We conduct the first scientific...

The paper describes three novel regularities in public choice games, tied to a Darwinian argument about rules that could be expected to govern social choice. Note: This is a revised version of this paper, originally titled "Two Tests For ‘NSNX’ Effects In Cooperation Experiments," and...

Benefit receipt in major household surveys is often under-reported. In recent years, as many as half of the dollars received through Food Stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Workers’ Compensation has not been reported in the Current Population Survey (CPS). High rates of...

This paper analyzes the forces contributing to the worldwide long-run rise in obesity and the role of public interventions in affecting its continued growth. The cause of a growth in obesity in a population must be that calorie consumption is outpacing the growth of physical activity. Yet in...

What consequences are borne by young men entering fatherhood as teenagers or when their partners are teenagers? This chapter focuses on a range of outcomes for the father himself. In particular, we will examine the role of teen childbearing on human capital accumulation (e.g., educational...

This account of the well-known Monty Hall puzzle is designed to provide a sharp focus on just how the illusory intuition arises by excluding various frequently-suggested possibilities.

Recent studies of the association between inequality, social capital and mortality at the state level rely on idiosyncratic measures of state social capital. We demonstrate that these statistical associations are sensitive to the methods used to calculate state social capital.

The United States has had an ambiguous relationship to the New Public Management (NPM) as a global public sector reform movement. Many of the themes, concepts, and tools of governance associated with NPM's managerial ideology-"business-like management," competitive tendering, incentives,...

NIMBY(Not In My Backyard) problems are ubiquitous. Even though it is evident that society needs noxious facilities such as waste sites, people oppose the siting of those facilities around their neighborhoods. Many compensation mechanisms are suggested by researchers in the literature. However,...

We show how Barro and Sahasakul (1986) and Stephenson’s (1998) different methods for calculating time series of average marginal personal federal labor income tax rates are based on very different models of tax evasion and avoidance. One model assumes that taxable and untaxable income are...