This paper addresses the role of the manager in a team production setting. The coach of a basketball team faces a team production arbitrage problem. He must monitor and enforce a process that distributes shots among players such that the expectation that each shot taken will be made is...

This Paper applies public-choice and modern regulatory theory to the twentieth-century Roman Catholic Church and atte mpts to discover why the decision was made, in 1966, to absolve Catho lics from the requirement that meat not be eaten on most Fridays of t he year. The authors provide a cartel...

This paper presents evidence consistent with an incentive-based theory of Olympic medal winning effort. As a result of a fundamental change in property rights regimes, the overall number of medals won by athletes from the former Soviet Bloc in Albertville and Barcelona was considerably below...

This paper analyzes the editorial screening process in economics, employing data from the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Quarterly Journal of Economics. We examine three issues: the decline of critical commentary in economics, the increased referencing behavior of...

This paper applies the theory of rent seeking to argue that economic reform, in the sense of correcting past deformities in the economy, does not pay from a social point of view. Economic reform, at best, should focus on the prevention of future deformities. The analysis is developed in terms of...

The "truth" in autobiography depends on the observable historical record of a person's life. The less attractive the observed life, the more "truthful" is the autobiography. This result does not require differential standards of honesty as among autobiographers. It does depend on the...