Bank regulators consider minimum capital standards essential for promoting well-functioning banking systems. Despite their existence, however, such standards have been insufficient to prevent periodic disruptions in the banking sectors of various countries. The most recent disruption was the...

The United States central government enactment of the 1866 Post Roads Act preempted state and municipal telegraph franchise entry barriers. Like present-day telecommunication companies, local franchise regulations were an entry barrier to United States telegraph companies. These pre-1866 state...

Europe is on the threshold of a campaign of imposing more disclosure requirements and costs through company and securities legislation. The following issues led to this European policy: Firstly, the SarbOx adaptation policy was put in place to protect European companies from the SEC's filings...

There exist multiple rationales for the U.S. extraterritorial tax system. The rationales seek to explain why overseas Americans should be subject to worldwide taxation by the United States.This paper challenges those rationales: The allegiance rationale is outmoded and rejected by the U.S....

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...

A central requirement in the design of a legal system is the protection of law enforcers from coercion by litigants through either violence or bribes. The higher the risk of coercion, the greater the need for protection and control of law enforcers by the state. This perspective explains why, in...

This paper investigates Gordon Tullock’s unpublished manuscripts that proposed a public choice interpretation of American slavery. Drafted in response to Conrad and Meyer’s seminal 1959 article on the economics of slavery, Tullock’s writings influenced the early cliometric debate over...

Assessing the consequences of population on the pace and process of economic growth is one of the oldest themes in the literature on economics. These assessments have varied enormously over time, spanning the highly pessimistic to the outright optimistic. A systematic review of the major studies...

This chapter in this book addressing inequality identifies elements of the U.S. income tax laws that contribute to that inequality. While the language of the tax laws is neutral and applies identical rules to all, the distribution of tax burdens among the members of the U.S. populace may not...

We examine the effect of enforcing minimum quality standards (MQSs) on consumer health. In the late 1800s, the urban milk supply was regularly skimmed and diluted with water, but consumers could not easily determine its quality because dyes, caramel, and salt were added. To protect consumers,...