In 1964 James Buchanan famously asked “What Should Economists Do?” He argued that economists should focus their intellectual attention on exchange and the institutions within which exchange takes place. This paper reflects on Buchanan’s message and looks at the development of that...

Regarding the future of the economy and human progress, the great political economist James Buchanan often described himself as a pessimist when he looked to the future but an optimist when he looked back because surely the world should be worse off than what it is. My position is slightly...

Regulation by the state can benefit or harm any business in society. While the market provides for consumers rather than special interests, rationally acting interests will be incentivized to use political means to capture rents, particularly if public clamor for regulation exists. The formation...

In this introduction I outline a logical continuity in Hayek's research program from technical economics to his political economy and social philosophy. By taking the starting point of economics as the question of the coordination of plans, Hayek's emphasis as an economist on how economic actors...

James Scott has written a detailed ethnography on the lives of the peoples of upland Southeast Asia who choose to escape oppressive government by living at the edge of their civilization. To the political economist the fascinating story told by Scott provides useful narratives in need of...

Chang (2011) raises doubts about the effects of institutions on economic development and questions the positive effects of entirely free markets based on secure private property rights. We respond by stressing that institutions structure the incentives underlying individual action, secure...

In this paper, we examine the resiliency of community recovery after a natural disaster. We argue that a resilient recovery requires robust economic/financial institutions, political/legal institutions, and social/cultural institutions. We explore how politically and privately created disaster...

Analytical anarchism is a subset of political economy that takes neither rules as given nor assumes that monopoly enforcement of such rules exists. This approach is the positive study of endogenous rule formation by individuals within a particular society. Such rules emerge out of the...