The automobile industry's high costs of entry, economies of scale, and network effects from distribution, fueling, and service lead many to conclude that new entrants have no chance. Tesla Motors has overcome many barriers to pioneer electric cars. Starting with partnerships and a minimum viable...

Prisoners’ dilemmas that exist in politics often allow leaders to benefit themselves through political actions harmful to their group’s interest. We develop a dynamic prisoners’ dilemma based on political competition, with the choices being to lobby (non cooperative choice) or not to lobby...

How much does income redistribution help the poor? First, the official data systematically overstates the inequality in incomes, implying that the poor are becoming worse off, when in fact, they are becoming better off. Second, government has done little to reduce poverty by transferring income...

A persuasive case for the market process cannot ignore the issue of morality. Unfortunately, while markets and market behavior depend on a moral foundation, it is one that seems inconsistent with the prevailing view of morality. This apparent inconsistency obscures in the minds of many the...

This paper examines empirically the hypothesis made famous by Nobel Laureates Friedrich A. Hayek and Milton Friedman that societies with high levels of political freedom must also have high levels of economic freedom. In our judgment, the Hayek-Friedman hypothesis holds up fairly well to...

A feature of post-World War II economic history is the growth in government, paradoxically accompanied by a decline in trust of government. How does a mistrusted institution continue to grow? We utilize key findings in the economics, behavioral, and psychology literatures to develop a model to...

For more than one hundred years, noble concerns have persuaded well-meaning people to favor more government to promote the public interest, and others have exploited those concerns to grab political privileges at public expense. Contrary to conventional thought, however, the history of...

We evaluate statistics from the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) to see how much free-market economists are being read and ranked compared with mainstream economists. We find that under various rankings using SSRN data, the top free-market economists rank among the most-read authors in the...

The teaching of economics at the Kindergarten-12 level has been highly researched and reported upon since the 1970’s and has primarily concentrated on curriculum, materials, enrollments, and effectiveness of teaching techniques. This paper summarizes two recent reviews of research, the results...