The paper examines the role of self-ownership versus other ownership of labor with implications for the interpretation of the historical evidence regarding timing of black migration from the South to the North after emancipation

Why did newly freed slaves and their descendants wait a half century before migrating in large numbers to the superior economic opportunities in the North? Census lifetime migration data on both movers and stayers are examined intertemporally for both whites and blacks. Regression analysis...

Why did newly freed slaves and their descendants wait a half a century before migrating in large numbers to the superior economic opportunities in the North? Census lifetime migration data on both movers and stayers are examined intertemporally for both whites and blacks. Regression analysis...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...

Fiscal policy has become quite controversial in the post-Keynesian era, the debate over the Obama stimulus package being a contentious recent example. Some pundits go so far as to take the position that macroeconomic theory has failed to meaningfully progress in terms of providing useful...

Elected representatives have little incentive to pursue the interests of those electing them once they are elected. This well-known principle-agent problem leads, in a variety of theories of government, to nonoptimally large levels of government expenditure. An implication is that budgetary...

Americans generally prefer freedom to coercion, high incomes to low ones, and individual decision-making to collective resolution of issues. For these reasons, they generally do not like laws that constrain their labor market behavior and force them to join collectives of other workers to...

This paper examines the dynamic relationship between economic freedom and income inequality in the 50 U.S. states over the 1979-2004 period. Using fixed effects regression analysis, we find evidence that increases in economic freedom are associated with lower income inequality, but the dynamic...

The UK government - in common with the governments of many Western countries - is in the midst of implementing policies to reform education. However, the government has, as a matter of principle, decided that profit-making schools cannot provide state-funded education even if they would lead to...

Public policy designed to promote greater college enrollment rates has often been justified as a means to reduce income inequalities, yet there is very little evidence that higher college attainment is associated with less inequality. Economic theory at best suggests that the relationship...