The professional class of which Ludwig von Mises (and to some extent also his friend Kelsen) was a member was not only fond of thinking of itself as the defender of their highly cultured environment. This large group of intellectuals, administrators, aristocrats, and politicians had also been...

Examines the social aspects of the compatibility of public academic education with the principles of a free society. Discusses state education with regard to “equal treatment for all” and the question of who will benefit from such treatment.

The paper presents closed-form Delta and Gamma hedges for an- nuities and death assurances, in the presence of both longevity and interest-rate risk. Longevity risk is modelled through an extension of the classical Gompertz law, while interest rate risk is modelled via an Hull-and-White process....

Commentators, public officials, and scholars have sounded alarms over the smartphone patent wars — hundreds of cases asserting infringement of patents by makers of smartphones and tablet computers—often suggesting broad, categorical “fixes” to problems this litigation reveals. In...

Institutions matter: they affect individual action, influence cooperation and are crucial in making the difference between wealth and poverty, growth and stagnation. Yet, the explanatory power of modern institutional economics has not been exceedingly satisfactory. This paper criticizes the...

The paper inquires why in some countries traditionally ruled by absolute monarchs the monarchy survived in the form of constitutional monarchy but not in others. It considers constitutional monarchy as a negotiated settlement between the king and a liberal opposition to share office rents, while...

The present paper analyses Luigi Einaudi’s role as opinion maker in the early decades of the twentieth century, when he was the leading columnist on economic issues at the Corriere della Sera. It focuses on the scope and limits of his efforts to broaden the consensus among the Italian public...

Determinants of risk attitudes of individuals are of great interest in the growing area of behavioral economics that focuses on the individual attributes, psychological or otherwise, that shape common financial and investment practices. The purpose of this paper is to review the empirical...

The paper provides natural hedging strategies among death benefits and annuities written on a single and on different generations. It obtains closed-form Delta and Gamma hedges, in the presence of both longevity and interest rate risk. We present an application to UK data on survivorship and...

Mihail Manoilescu was one of the main intellectual personalities of the interwar period in Romania. He was known as a politician and a central banker, but also as an economist. From the very beginning of his theoretical and practical career, or at least from the late 1920s till the end of his...