This paper investigates whether individuals might voluntarily join and re-main members of a state in which high levels of social insurance are pro-vided. That is to say, are there plausible circumstances in which a social welfare state can be regarded as "liberal" in the sense that it has the...

Socialism is back on the political agenda in the United States. Politicians and some economists who identify as socialists, however, do not discuss property relations, a topic that was central in the intellectual history of socialism, but rather limit themselves to advocacy of economic reforms,...

This paper, written as a contribution to a festchrift in honor of Neil Komesar, subjects his "comparative institutional analysis" (CIA) to a comparative analysis with various other social-scientific approaches to CIA. Neil Komesar is among the very few legal scholars who has taken to heart...

We analyze the interaction between human capital and growth in Russia, where there are substantial human capital reserves but an education system seriously out of sync with the world economy. We define a rule for the timing of educational restructuring, and show that this time is pareto optimal...

This paper uses data from 20 OECD countries to investigate the impact of welfare state institutions (especially employment protection, wage bargaining and work incentives) on the functioning of the labour market both theoretically and empirically. It shows that the impact of welfare state...

The goal of this paper is to present an optimal resource allocation model for the regional allocation of public service inputs. The proposed solution leads to maximise the relative public service availability in regions located below the best availability frontier, subject to exogenous budget...