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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

What role do whistleblowers play in democratic politics? This paper answers this question by analyzing the political economy of whistleblowing within democratic political institutions. Democratic politics is characterized by numerous principal-agent problems creating significant space for...

State-provided defense is a form of non-comprehensive government planning subject to two inherent problems. The first is the “knowledge problem” of how to allocate scarce resources to their highest-valued uses. The second is the “power problem” due to the discretionary power granted to...

Thinking was Gordon Tullock's primary interest in life. He let his thinking roam widely and creatively over his many fields of interest; moreover, Tullock is widely recognized for the robust and creative quality of this thought. He left a valuable legacy. All the same, I think the value of that...