U.S. public and private debt is traced to the decision of the First Congress in 1790 to borrow the new nation's money supply. This established a debt imperative that requires debt to grow by compounding interest. When debt fails to grow enough, the economy goes into various degrees of recession....

The United States has long suffered from a schizophrenia about energy policy. The importance of one of the factors in energy policy, the environment, has never been formally defined. Climate change adds another distinct layer to this complexity, as neither energy policies nor environmental...

We illustrate how the desire to live in a fair society that rewards individual effort and hard work triggers an unselfish though rational demand for redistribution. This leads the well off to prefer higher taxes and the poor to reject extreme progressivity. We then provide evidence of these...

This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

This paper investigates whether elite interconnections contribute to unethical behavior. It aims to present a clear explanation of how these connections are established, analyze the presence of unethical conduct within them, and assess their impact on the economy and societal welfare. This paper...

We suggest that stabilizing the baseline income can make low-wage workers more tolerant towards high income earners. We present evidence of this attitude in the UK by exploiting the introduction of the National Minimum Wage (NMW), which institutionally sets a baseline pay reducing the risk of...

In Nudge (2008) Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein suggested that public policy-makers arrange decision-making contexts in ways to promote behaviour change in the interest of individual citizens as well as that of society. However, in the public sphere and Academia alike widespread discussions...

Legislative misbehavior is best curbed through rational legislating requirements, whereby legislators must include in the legislative record an explicit elaboration of the path of lawmaking - from evidence, through findings, to ultimate conclusions - that clearly sets out the analytic connection...

This paper introduces preliminary evidence from a cross-country database of policy characteristics and potential uses of that database. While most databases have emphasized either the content of policies (e.g., size of government deficits) or countries&' formal institutions (e.g., political...