I develop the idea of malignant monetary monocentricity: that contemporary central banks are systematically unlikely to deliver macroeconomic stability due to institutionally entrenched information and incentive problems. I also argue that polycentric monetary systems, best approximated by...

We argue James M. Buchanan's scholarship provides us an exemplary model for doing liberal political economy. Levy (2014) argues there are irreconcilable tensions within liberalism between rationalism and pluralism. Buchanan navigates these tensions in a way that powered one of the most important...

We develop a theory of financial stability based on insights from the literature on polycentric governance and institutional resilience. We contend that top-down regulatory approaches to achieving financial stability will prove ineffective, due to various knowledge and incentive problems. In...

The problem of financial stability is political and institutional, rather than narrowly economic. To achieve a more resilient financial system, we need to pay attention to the incentives of actors who have the power to act discretionarily, and to the knowledge limitations of such actors in the...

I develop a theory of sovereign entrepreneurship, which is a special kind of political entrepreneurship. Sovereignty is rooted in self-enforced exchange of political property rights. Sovereign entrepreneurship is the creative employment of political property rights to advance a plan. Building on...

We develop a theory of self-enforcing monetary constitutions. A monetary constitution is the framework of rules within which money-providing and money-using agents interact. A self-enforcing monetary constitutions is upheld by the agents acting within the system; it thus does not require...

While the primary causes of the 2007-8 financial crisis are disputed, many economists hold that the monetary policy missteps played a role in causing or prolonging the financial crisis. In light of the perceived failure of monetary orthodoxy, monetary models are being theoretically refined and...

This paper makes a simple but underappreciated point: due to the open-ended nature of constitutional entrepreneurship, the personal characteristics of constitutional entrepreneurs — intellect, will, virtues and vices, etc. — directly bear on constitutional change. The paper demonstrates this...