We review and jointly test various competing theoretical and empirical models of U.S. federal deficits using annual data from 1889 to 1998. We find that tax smoothing matters and that political and interest group/distributional factors are also present in our results. Copyright 2002, Oxford...

The Catholic Church reacted to the Protestant Reformation by taking on the defensive posture of an incumbent-firm monopoly fighting to survive in the face of new competition. Contemporary firms typically respond to rival entry by rewriting their corporate charter. So did the medieval Catholic...

The Alchian and Allen theorem predicts that it will be harder to find "good" apples in the State of Washington, a prime apple-growing region, than in, say, New York City, where the addition of shipping charges makes "bad" apples comparatively more expensive. We recast the theorem as a testable...