Lijphart (1997) endorses compulsory voting as a means to increase voter turnout. Considering the likely effects of the role of information (including its costs) on the decision to vote and taking an expressive view of voting, however, compels us to investigate two unexamined claims by such...

In the popularly used ranking method of peer rating, the exclusion of the evaluations/marks given to oneselves is intuitively appealing and has been actually practiced, since a person/university/country typically is biased in favor of itself. This short paper shows that this apparently...

In a more extensive study, presented at the RATIO Conference on Knowledge and Policy Change in August of 2011, I examined the role economists played in the Swedish public debate over its financial and economic crisis of 1992 and 1993 (Jakee 2011). I argued that this Swedish experience is highly...

This article investigates three related questions: first, whether the Australian Football League exhibits attendance asymmetries across the available playing slots; second, whether various subgroups of teams in the AFL have equal access to the more highly attended time slots; and, third, whether...

A mounting empirical literature clearly indicates that the core programs of the welfare state are unsustainable in their present form. The proximate cause of this growing fiscal instability is a demographic imbalance between younger contributors and older beneficiaries. The authors argue,...

This article highlights the normative bias in the entrepreneurial theories of Schumpeter and Kirzner. This bias, while significant, has remained largely implicit, and the approaches of both authors, we argue, entail "Panglossian" views of entrepreneurial processes. We trace these problems to...

Recently, Australia's two largest brewers, Carlton and United Breweries and Lion Nathan, have been aggressively competing for market share in the state of Victoria. Among other strategies, the two breweries have implemented vertical restraints in the form of 'extensive' agreements with retailers...

We investigate whether people are influenced to make investment decisions based on random shock signals and to what extent they do so by exploiting a unique data set from a popular Chinese lottery game with over one million observations. We first present evidence that people, as individual...