Should projects funded with taxpayer money be discounted at a lower rate than privately funded projects? I analyze the discount rate applied to long-term cash flows in public (in-house) versus private (contracting out) provision of public goods subject to regulatory burdens. I develop a model...

It has become commonplace to describe publicly-provided infrastructure as being in a sorry state, and to advance public-private partnership as a possible remedy. This essay adopts a skeptical but not a cynical posture toward those claims. The paper starts by reviewing the comparative properties...

Economic theory contains a significant theoretical antinomy. Markets are thought to secure coordination in self-organized fashion. In contrast, polities are portrayed as securing coordination through planning and administration. Doing this is to commit what Mitchel Resnick (1994) calls the...

Economic theory contains a significant theoretical antinomy that we seek to erase. That theory can account for coordination through markets. Such coordination, however, covers only some 50-60 percent of economic activity within developed nations. The theory ignores the remainder by presuming...

I test whether public-sector ownership reduces conventional measures of market risk by using an exogenous event to the air transportation industry. I find that government-sponsored enterprises show lower price volatility than non-government-sponsored enterprises, arguably due to the government's...

The paper presents comparative statics of organizational modes of natural monopoly in public utilities with a focus on co-ownership and co-governance. Private monopoly lowers output and increases price to maximize profit; public monopoly incurs higher costs due to the lack of know-how; and a...

This paper combines insights from Ludwig von Mises about the mixed economy and Vilfredo Pareto about non-logical action within a social system to explore some intertemporal dynamics of an entangled system of political economy. Mises explained the inherent instability of the mixed economy. Pareto...

This paper explores a political economy of liberty, in contrast to the customary pursuit of a political economy of control. Where a political economy of control theorizes in hierarchical fashion by postulating the state as a singular locus of control, a political economy of liberty theorizes in...

The term “tax state” originated in a controversy between Rudolf Goldscheid and Joseph Schumpeter over the treatment of Austria's public debt in the aftermath of World War I and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Goldschied asserted that this debt represented a crisis for a state...

Expositions of the theory of public finance mostly assume that taxation must be the primary instrument for generating revenue. This assumption is neither historically accurate nor theoretically necessary. Rather, it universalizes an institutional arrangement that is particular to the...