The idea of an identifiable school of thought denoted as Virginia political economy was in play at least as early as 1963, and it is reasonable to conclude that this identifier began to take shape some years earlier. It is common though not universal to identify a school of thought...

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...

How did modern and centralized fiscal institutions emerge? We develop a model that explains (i) why pre-industrial states relied on private individuals to collect taxes; (ii) why after 1600 both England and France moved from competitive methods for collecting revenues to allocating the right to...

Democratic governments can be either national or federal in form. Whether the form of democracy matters, how it matters if, indeed, it does matter, and for whom it might matter are the types of questions this paper explores. Federalism is generally described as a pro-liberty form of government....

This paper argues that government and market institutions when interacting with one another lead to the generation of a network effect in property value. Using data from the Florida Department of Revenue on market value assessments of homes in 17 counties, I find that living in a basic governing...

This essay is written for a Festschrift to commemorate Jürgen Backhaus's contribution to law and economics in recognition of his long service as Editor of the European Journal of Law and Economics. Scholars of law and economics have long been intrigued by the possibility that legal processes...

Friedrich Hayek (1937, 1945) explained that scholars engage in fantasy when they presume that they, or anyone for that matter, presume to possess the knowledge necessary to construct some societal equilibrium. That knowledge is incapable of being possessed by a single mind, which means that the...

This essay explores the legacy of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock as it pertains to the establishment of public choice as a field of scholarly inquiry. The Calculus of Consent is surely the Ur-text for capturing that legacy, yet that legacy can be discerned in two distinct directions. One...

This paper focuses on some of the overlooked costs of war-related public research. We discuss two unseen consequences of war-related public science. The first is the distortionary effect of government-influenced research on academic disciplines. The second is the opportunity cost of the...