This paper studies the interaction between a governmental security agency, as the Transportation Security Agency, or the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and a terrorist organization, like Al Qaeda. The governmental agency wants to stop the terrorists, but first must infer whether a visa...

This paper explores the reasoning underlying Milton Friedman's preference for a small, unbalanced budget over a large, balanced one. Because the marginal return from government spending is less than the marginal cost (measured in terms of the amount of income private individuals remain free to...

Local governments' allocation decisions are modeled in the context of a slack maximizing bureaucrat who produces public goods according to a production function that includes both provision and the constituents' socioeconomic characteristics. To gain a better understanding of the determinants of...

Local governments' allocation decisions are modeled in the context of a slack maximizing bureaucrat who produces public goods according to a production function that includes both provision and the constituents' socio-economic characteristics. To gain a better understanding of the determinants...

In the competition for a monopoly right in which the number of bidders is fixed, Tullock and others have found the value of the resources spent in the aggregate to capture the transfer to be sometimes less than and sometimes greater than the value of the monopoly. We think this approach to be...

The conventional (Chicago) wisdom about the Great Contraction is that it was the result of a massive policy failure. According to this view, the collapse of the economy was brought about mostly by the fact that the monetary policymakers of the day were more concerned with internal power...

During the first seven years (1979–1985) of Kenya's second head of state, the process of establishing a stable supporting coalition was accompanied by rapid increases in government spending. As evidenced by continued increase in the size of the cabinet as announced in early 1988, the process...

Hurricane Katrina revealed massive governmental failure at the local, state and federal levels. This commentary brings the modern theory of property rights and public choice reasoning to bear in explaining why officials failed to strengthen New Orleans's levee system despite forewarning of its...