What can today's corporate raiders learn from the scourge of the high seas? A lot, as it turns out! Pirates have a surprising amount to teach about building better organizations, promoting diversity in the workplace, and creating powerful brands, among many other business lessons. Curious to...

Existing studies of entrepreneurship focus on entrepreneurs whose individual contribution to wealth creation is typically trivial: self-employed persons. This paper investigates entrepreneurs whose individual contribution to wealth creation is enormous: billionaires. We explore the relationship...

Peter Leeson, August Hardy and Paola Suarez (2022) test maximizing behaviour of panhandlers at several Metrorail stations in Washington, D.C. Their main findings are that "stations with more panhandling opportunities attract more panhandlers" (the first statement) and that "cross-station...

The efficiency of “quasimarkets” — decentralized public goods provision subjected to Tiebout competition — is a staple of public choice conventional wisdom. Yet in the 1990s a countermovement in political economy called “neoconsolidationism” began to challenge this wisdom. The...

Violent conflict destroy resources. It generates "destruction costs." These costs have an important effect on individual's decisions to cooperate or conflict. We develop two models of conflict: one in which conflict's destruction costs are independent of individuals' investment in "arms" - the...