Recognition of conflicts of interest between French Canadians in Quebec and English Canadians in the rest of Canada is a necessary first step in the evaluation of proposals from Quebec for the refrom of the Canadian constitution, as well as for the design of institutions for an entirely...

Important as it is for public policy, there is still no consensus about the size of the revenue-maximizing tax rate at the top of the Laffer curve. The purpose of this essay is not to supply a correct rate, but to identify difficulties in doing so. 1) Estimates of the revenue-maximizing tax rate...

This paper is about a model of uncertainty in voting that allows for a schedule of people`s preferences for one party over another, that gives rise to a chance of casting a pivotal vote which is small but not, as often supposed, infinitesimal, that is not inconsistent with evidence about the...

1) Bargaining Unexplained, page 2 2) Bargaining Assumptions in the Study of Politics, Law and War, page 27 3) Bargaining and Voting, page 49

A common, though by no means universally-accepted doctrine among practitioners of law and economics is that redistribution is no business of the law. This efficiency-only doctrine is not that redistribution is unworthy as a social objective, but that any given benefit to the poor is attainable...

Patents raise the price and reduce consumption of the patented good, but the resulting deadweight loss is thought to be worth bearing when patent protection is required as an incentive to invention. The newly-invented good generates a residual surplus, making people better off than they would be...

The incentive to advertise is a consequence of monopoly power, for there is nothing to gain from advertising by a firm that can sell its entire output at an invariant market price. Advertising is expenditure by a firm to increase the elasticity of demand for its product or to shift the demand...

The liberal society might be supposed to have emerged directly from anarchy, spontaneously or in a social contract; or the liberal society might be supposed to have emerged indirectly by a roundabout process in which anarchy gave way in the first instance to despotism and then despotism gave way...

Justification of private property may be rights-based or needs-based. One may believe that society with private ownership of a significant part of the means of production is good or just in itself, or one may believe that a society with private ownership of a significant part of the means of...