This note explores the decay of social norms using a model of the production of social order in the context of 'rules' employed by cities/municipalities to 'govern' activities during Halloween. The empirical results suggest that population homogeneity, the upper class' scope for 'purchasing'...

Until 1985, research in the economics literature on state lotteries was based on the simplifying assumption that administrative costs were constant. DeBoer (1985) provided empirical evidence supporting the idea that average administrative costs are not constant, but decline with output. In other...

The economics and sociology literature has given much attention to the proper role of athletics in the mission of institutions of higher education. This discussion has turned into a debate; one argument holds that athletics fit nicely into the mission of most colleges. However, it has also been...

This article studies the employment effects of mergers and acquisitions in the manufacturing, financial and service sectors of the US economy using annual time series data from 1978 to 2008. An empirical model is developed in which average wages per hour and the total value of mergers and...

Tullock recently offered six possible explanations for the observed size disparity between the rent-seeking industry in the major democracies and the value of the actual rent to be derived. One of these is the possibility that rent-seeking is considered immoral by large segments of society, who...

The present provides alternative specifications for public choice models that analyse the determinants of a variety of in-kind efforts to obtain monopoly rights (or rent-seek). A variable relating to the age of states in the USA provides suggestive empirical evidence of the importance of...

Do network news agencies (ABC, CBS, and NBC) play their dominant strategies in selecting the lead news story (cover story) for nightly newscasts? The present paper seeks an answer to this question by employing elementary game-theory analysis and simple logit/ordered logit regression models to...

The present note provides an extension of the Mixon and Gibson (2001) study of the retention of various types of concealed gun laws across the 50 states of the US by developing a simultaneous system of demand (interest group) and supply (legislative) equations as a 'market for laws'. This...

A ranking is provided of Southern economics departments and Southern economists using research output data indexed by the Journal of Economic Literature's EconLit database from 1982-1997. Ranking results from a smaller 'core' of each Southern institution's American Economic Association members...

This study offers a new approach to measure the adoption practices of right-to-work legislation by states over time. By allowing the dependent variable to represent the number of years a state has had the RTW legislation (with 1989 as the terminal year), the intensity of adoption can be...