Research on the presence of consumer racial discrimination in the baseball labor and memorabilia markets has produced contradictory empirical results. While studies of baseball salaries-find no evidence of discrimination, Nardinelli and Simon (1990) and Andersen and La Croix (1991) use data from...

For more than 70 years, a strand of Keynesian thought has maintained that the cure for economic depressions is merely a matter of simple arithmetic. According to these Keynesians, the government need only increase spending by an amount equal to the ratio of the output gap to the fiscal...

I examine the provision of free and fair elections using a decision-theoretic model in which election observers provide a noisy information signal concerning fraud. Monitoring an election is not always worth the cost and so democracy is not always sustainable. A strong preference for fair...

Using papers published in 2003 and 2004, we measure the extent of math-free research in top economics journals. Of more than 1200 papers published in ten top journals, six percent met a weak criterion of math-free, three percent an intermediate criterion, and only 1.5 percent a strong criterion....

Spontaneous or emergent orders in human affairs are based upon voluntary interactions among individuals. Yet the physical environment influences the subsequent interactions which occur. While the interactions may be voluntary, the confines of a built environment – physical systems and...

The failure of economic central planning in the Soviet Union is interpreted as evidence of the impossibility of efficient central planning. But the deficiencies of the Soviet economy might have resulted from other factors, such as Soviet history, culture, leadership, and/or unique circumstances,...