Explanations of unethical behavior often neglect the role of competition, as opposed to greed, in assuring its spread. Using the examples of child labor, corruption, excessive' executive pay, corporate earnings manipulation, and commercial activities by universities, this paper clarifies the...

Economic theory and evidence from a variety of debt markets shed light on current reform proposals concerning emerging market debt. Debt markets, including the U.S. municipal bond market, generally function best when the rights of creditors are protected most effectively. Since current IMF...

Regulation of economic activity is ubiquitous around the world, yet standard theories predict it should be rather uncommon. I argue that the ubiquity of regulation is explained not so much by the failure of markets, or by asymmetric information, as by the failure of courts to solve contract and...

Private ownership should generally be preferred to public ownership when the incentives to innovate and to contain costs must be strong. In essence, this is the case for capitalism over socialism, explaining the dynamic vitality' of free enterprise. The great economists of the 1930s and 1940s...

We present a model of succession in a firm owned and managed by its founder. The founder decides between hiring a professional manager or leaving management to his heir, as well as on how much, if any, of the shares to float on the stock exchange. We assume that a professional is a better...