Can a court system conceivably control opportunistic behavior if judges are selected from the same population as ordinary citizens and thus are no better than the rest of us? This paper provides a new and, as we claim, quite profound rational choice answer to that unsolved riddle. Adopting an...

Can a court system conceivably control opportunistic behavior if judges are selected from the same population as ordinary citizens and thus are no better than "the rest of us"? This paper provides a new and, as we claim, quite profound "rational choice" answer to that unsolved riddle. Adopting...

We identify three points of intersection between economics and ethics: the ethics of economics, ethics in economics and ethics out of economics. These points of intersection reveal three types of conversation between economists and moral philosophers that have produced, and may continue to...

Our object is to explicate Buchanan's conception of individual liberty and to trace its connection to the 'working themes' in his corpus-anarchy, contract, constitution, Pareto optimality, 'public choice' and so on. In doing so, we investigate a number of tensions in Buchanan's...

Reduction in carbon dioxide emissions constitutes a global public good; and hence there will be strong incentives for countries to free ride in the provision of CO2 emission reductions. In the absence of more or less binding international agreements, we would expect carbon emissions to be...

We explicate an iron law of intergenerational transmission of income dispersion. The same mechanism that limited income disparities, as population and prosperity increased through much of the early industrial revolution, will now sharply exaggerate inequality. The reason is that, for the first...