Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French thinker who did most of his writing in the last six years of his life. One of his major contributions to economic thought was his application of opportunity cost to a wide range of economic policies. The present paper uses the Bastiat approach to...

This paper provides a unique contractual analysis of privatization from a state-owned company to a privately-owned company. Using a contractual approach, we analyze the advantages and disadvantages of private ownership versus state ownership under various circumstances. Our analyses focus on...

Modern economics is filled with models using simultaneous equations to explain economic behavior. One common model, the circular flow diagram, is found in many principles-level textbooks, and is offered as the basic way in which economies function. The entrepreneur, if included at all, is...

The informal institutional structure embraces the social norms and moral values of a particular society and together with the formal institutional frame they compose the social environment. Social norms and values, congealed into customary rules of behaviour, provide a stable and enduring...

This paper examines James Steuart's explanation of the emergence of the exchange economy. An initial hypothesis holds the decisive influence of a plan designed and implemented by merchants. Our proposal evokes the importance, acknowledged by Steuart, of the construction of institutions,...

Ronald Coase had a profound impact on scholarship worldwide, and not for his ideas alone. Coase’s ideas about transaction costs, the nature of the firm, the role of government, and the problem of social cost have been hugely influential. Throughout his long life, he also worked to change the...

Chapter 12 of Keynes' General Theory has concepts and analytical links with strong identification with the ones used by the so-called institutional approaches. This essay highlights what seems to have been anticipated by Keynes on the research core of institutional economics, mainly based on his...

For many years, the ideas of Knight and Keynes have been widely understood to overlap greatly and they are presumed to have developed notions of uncertainty that deeply intersect, both describing a state where outcomes have non-probabilistic likelihoods. Further, even their political...

Drawing inspiration from Ross Emmett's (2006) imaginative construction of what Frank Knight might have thought about the Stigler-Becker formulation of Die Gustibus, I ask what Arthur Lovejoy (1936) might have thought about the origin of public choice. He would surely have denied that public...

In this overview we give a short survey of the way in which the theory of the firm has been formulated within the `mainstream' of economics, both `past' and `present'. One aim is to give an outline of the historical developments that led to the contemporary theories. As to a breakpoint between...