Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, acid rain was an important topic of public debate. Newspapers ramped up coverage in the early 1980s, which then peaked in the mid-1980s and died off slowly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to be rarely seen again. The question asked is whether the tone of...

This paper examines the reaction of the market to news that the "Washington Post" had won a Pulitzer Prize for a story that was demonstrably false. The reaction to the stock price of the "Post" as well as the stock prices of other newspapers is examined using dummy variables for two days, four...

The Alchian and Allen Theorem has been a popular staple of many economics classes since Armen Alchian and William Allen first introduced it in their well-known text "University Economics". The Theorem says that the addition of the same fixed cost to two similar goods will result in an increase...

We explore whether higher levels of the real minimum wage have differing effects on high school dropout rates across students of various races and ethnicities (whites, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians). Using a panel of data across Maryland counties and annual observations in 1993-2004,...

Before the year 1600, Brazil and the United States were very similar regions in terms of geographic development and colonial status, and yet both countries developed in remarkably different ways. In this article, we apply institutional analysis and the common pool approach to explain differences...

Walter Block's amusing and popular "Defending the Undefendable" offers an intentionally shocking collection of short chapters, each praising a different "rogue" of modern society-including the pimp, slumlord, and corrupt cop-from a libertarian viewpoint. However, Block's defense of the "heroic"...