Abstract For most of a millennium, “legislation” largely meant special legislation: narrow bills tailored to the interests of particular persons, firms, or property. Generally applicable acts that covered all persons were greeted with suspicion. Today, the reverse is true: experts and the...

The socialist calculation debate occurred simultaneously with the development of increasingly idealized neoclassical market models in the early decades of the 20th century. Nonetheless, free market neoclassical economists were conspicuously absent from that debate, leaving the pro-market case to...

Despite its salience in modern politics, political scandal has yet to be treated as a subject of inquiry in political economy. This paper offers a rational choice theory of scandal as the result of the strategic production and use of scarce knowledge regarding politicians, parties, and...

The recession of 2007 to 2009 provided a textbook illustration of the ways in which government policies intended to expand credit and capital investment can engender perverse incentives and foster systematic malinvestment. This paper will examine how politically motivated efforts by government...

A literature begun by Rotemberg (1984) and revived in a series of articles in recent years contends that common ownership offers residual claimants a means of solving the oligopoly defection problem and ensuring adherence to collusive agreements. The two industries to have been directly targeted...

An existing literature examines the degree to which modern commercial banking constitutes a competitive industry and the effects of various policies on the degree of competition in that market. This paper applies time series analysis to examine competitiveness over the period since the passage...