One of the most important developments in the capital markets over the past decade presents a puzzle that needs to be solved. The development is the dramatic expansion of the unregulated market for private securities in the United States. The puzzle is that public choice theory, the dominant...

This paper analyzes the incentive effects of pollution taxes versus pollution permits for a budget oriented Government. Pollution permits are analyzed as durable goods, and a pollution tax is seen as an equivalent to leasing pollution permits. First, a general model is developed and then four...

In July 2014, against the backdrop of an escalating conflict in Ukraine and the crash of a civilian passenger airliner in the active combat zone there, the OECD's sanctions against Russia were severely toughened. A ban was imposed on the issuance of long-term loans (for periods over 90 days) to...

The National Labor Relations Board's (NLRB)seeming powerlessness to process dues objector cases has led to a proliferation of state sponsored "paycheck protection" laws and popular referenda devised to ensure that workers will not be obliged to pay dues for non-germane purposes. Recently,...

Regulatory takings arise when the government adopts a regulation so restrictive of private property's use that it is tantamount to the loss an owner would suffer if the government had simply acquired it. Current American practice always offers compensation to landowners whose property is...

Defining rules politically poses the general question of which aspects of social ordering are tractable to public institutional resolution. But not all institutions emerge from the same processes of spontaneous ordering; self-interest subject to market discipline looks very different than...

There has been a division of labor in the “behavioral sciences”. This is perhaps most striking in two of the largest behavioral disciplines, economics and psychology. Since 1990, a number of economists have crossed this boundary. But James Buchanan was one of the first economists to take the...

This paper estimates the causal effect of fiscal rules on political budget cycles in a sample of 67 developing countries over the period 1985-2007. We exploit the geographical pattern in the adoption of fiscal rules to isolate an exogenous source of variation in the adoption of national fiscal...

What determines the enforcement of deregulation reform of business activities? What are the outcomes of deregulation? We address these questions using an episode of a drastic reform in Russia between 2001 and 2004 which liberalized registration, licensing, and inspections. Based on the analysis...

This paper integrates findings from several different case studies on Mission-Oriented Innovation Policies (MOIPs) and makes use of existing literature to briefly describe three other missions: The War on Cancer, homeownership in the United States, and the Swedish Million Program. Together with...