We find that presidential and congressional influences affect the rate of disaster declaration and the allocation of FEMA disaster expenditures across states. States politically important to the president have a higher rate of disaster declaration by the president, and disaster expenditures are...

Purpose Existing literature has expressed significant pessimism about the outcomes of foreign aid received by developing nations. Foreign aid can lead to negative outcomes by generating greater rent-seeking opportunities and creating aid dependence. While aid’s negative impact has been...

We hypothesize that the failure of government to protect the rights of individuals from violence committed by youths has led to the formation of youth gangs as protective agencies. Our theory predicts an opposite direction of causality between gang activity and violent crime from what is widely...

In this paper we provide a statistical analysis of authorship in Public Choice over the past 30 years. We explore trends in article length and coauthorship, as well as provide rankings of individual authors and institutions by total pages published in the journal. This is the first such ranking...

This paper presents a diagrammatic solution to the firm’s profit-maximizing price discrimination problem in the face of capacity constraints. Airlines, hotels, and other firms practice yield management, allocating fixed capacity to customer groups paying different prices. In these cases, the...

Could bad weather be responsible for U.S. corruption? Natural disasters create resource windfalls in the states they strike by triggering federally provided natural-disaster relief. By increasing the benefit of fraudulent appropriation and creating new opportunities for such theft,...