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...

George Stigler’s “The Theory of Economic Regulation” (1971) is a landmark in the economics of regulation. It used simple public choice reasoning to set out the “capture theory” of regulation whereby “… as a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated...

In this article I selectively survey the economic history literature on the rise of regulation in America during the Progressive Era with the goal of identifying how this literature is informed by Austrian economic theory, and how Austrian theory might contribute to our understanding of the...

Vincent Ostrom's legacy is revisited in this paper along three dimensions: Ostrom's contributions as a historian of politico-economic thought, as a complexity theorist, and as an epistemologist. All three dimensions are captured from a perspective which has seldom been studied systematically...

This paper discloses how Smith rewrites some assumption as result, and uses some result to construct question. Such tautological methods derive nothing. It is also incorrect to treat public goods as continuous variables