This paper presents the preface and first chapter of my book on James M. Buchanan, which should be out in late 2017, published by Lexington. This chapter introduces Buchanan to those who don't know him, or who know him only in terms of individual pieces of work they have encountered. I portray...

Problems of justice, such as high managerial salaries or the introduction of minimum wages, today arouse a lot of public attention and debate. This hints at the general fact that “justice” cannot be reduced to mere efficiency questions as economists very often tend to assume. Therefore, this...

The legal realist Robert Lee Hale offered a definition of freedom as a zero-sum game: each volitional freedom implies some degree of coercion over other people's freedom and at the same time one's liberty is subject to some degree of control and coercion by others. The objective of our work is...

A major issue raised by Alfred Marshall is whether competitive industries are subject to increasing or decreasing returns in the long run. If variations from constant returns exist, what are the causes, and is competitive output efficient? In competitive output is not efficient, what policies...

This essay is the first step in a larger effort to understand exactly how and why the marginal revolution gave us a theory of economic policy that evidenced an increased confidence in the ability of governmental policy actions to improve on the performance of the market. This was done via two...

This paper examines the positions of Coase and Pigou about the problem of the externalities. From the reading of their most two important works it appears that Coase has a more relevant preference for a evaluation of efficiency at the total, while Pigou, with some exception, is convinced that is...

One of the more striking features of the debate over the Coase theorem is the wide variety of models and theoretical frameworks used to discuss, evaluate, or otherwise analyze Coase’s result - an artifact of an ambiguity in Coase’s reasoning. Some framed Coase’s result in a bargaining...