Natural resources in sub-Saharan Africa suffer from a bad reputation. Oil and diamonds, particularly, have been blamed for a number of Africa’s illnesses such as poverty, corruption, dictatorship and war. This paper outlines the different areas and transmission channels of how this so-called...

J.M. Keynes and F.A. Hayek had different economic ideas even though both were subjectivists seriously engaged with issues of time and uncertainty in economics. The source of the difference between their economic ideas was the difference between their philosophical ideas. Keynes was a Cartesian...

In this paper we consider the way in which authorities arise in response to the need for coordination. In a model of local interaction, an authority is understood as a self-enforcing coordination selection structure, where the threat of violence ensures compliance. Such authorities form if...

This paper provides empirical evidence, from the study of sixteen major Indian states for the period 1980-2001, that under the economic reform process, the better institutional mechanism could actually help economies to grow faster with higher level of economic well-being. We estimate economic...

In this paper we argue that authorities aid cooperation by means of direct coordination or the enforcement of pre-commitment devices such as contract laws.Credible threats of violence allow this role. In a local interaction model, an authority forms if mutually connected individuals with...

Regarding the trade-off between the depth and the duration of recessions, there exists a mounting empirical evidence of the idiosyncratic and non-synchronized behavior of the business cycle over time within and across countries. In this paper, I propose a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium...

Meta-rules, or rules for making rules, determine the costs of innovation and thus the pace of economic growth. Adapting rules to a changing economic environment through explicit, well-designed meta-rules makes economic growth quicker, less painful, and more certain than adapting rules through...

This paper examines the role of “observer-subject feedback” namely the interaction effect between the social science observer and the subject being observed. When the observer is the government and the subject is a citizen, it is often the case that the subject may have incentives to distort...

This is a commentary on Vernon Smith's contributions to experimental economics