Where should we place Frank Knight in the passage from classical liberalism to neo-liberalism? The argument has recently been made by that Knight should be placed among the group of liberals of an “older generation” that neo-liberals generally, and the Chicago School in particular, separated...

The English polymath Frank Ramsey was one of the first scholars to paint a subjective picture of probability, but how and when did he make this discovery? Among other things, Cheryl Misak's beautiful biography of Ramsey explores this remarkable terrain, which we review in part one of this paper....

F.A. Hayek essentially quit economic theory and gave up the phenomena of industrial fluctuations as an explicit object of theoretical investigation following the publication of his last work in technical economics, 1941's The Pure Theory of Capital. Nonetheless, several of Hayek's more...

The paper aims to establish that Terence Hutchison's argument in The Politics and Philosophy of Economics (1981) to the effect that the young F.A. Hayek maintained a methodological position markedly similar to that of Ludwig von Mises fails to establish the relevant conclusion. The first problem...

This paper provides a narrative of the emergence of the standard textbook definition of public goods. It focuses on Richard A. Musgrave's contribution in defining public goods as non-rival and non-excludable — from 1937 to 1973. Although Samuelson's mathematical definition is generally used in...

Lewis claimed that his 1954 model of economic development in a dual economy was based on the classical framework originally advanced by Smith, Malthus, Ricardo and Marx. The present paper provides a detailed investigation of how Lewis adopted and adapted classical concepts such as...

This paper explores James Buchanan’s contributions to urban economics and urban public finance. Buchanan never self-identified as an “urban economist,” so his contributions to the field tend to blend into his broader body of work on public finance and externalities. However, in a series of...