The purpose of this chapter is to share some general thoughts about teaching the broad undergraduate public economics course that might be helpful to new teachers of this course and some ideas about dealing with particular topics that might be useful to even experienced teachers. Like others who...

Horse racing is an important industry throughout much of the world, and gambling has been increasingly relied on to provide financial support for beleaguered state governments. Technology has changed the way track patrons bet, with the vast and increasing majority of total bets being made away...

In this sample of 49 Latin American, OECD, and transition economies, it is the ineffective and discretionary administration of tax and regulatory regimes--not higher tax rates alone--as well as corruption, that increases the size of the unofficial economy. And countries with a larger unofficial...

Valuation of external costs created from transport is important to undertake in order to improve the decision-making basis for transport policy. In particular, this information could be utilised with respect to policy measures for the internalisation of external costs as well as with respect to...

The quality of one's social network significantly affects his economic success. Even after the skill acquisition period, the social network influences economic success through various routes such as mentoring, job searching, business connections, or information channeling. In this paper I...

This report on new economic insights summarizes the evolutionary perspective on the theory of economic policy. It emphasizes the limited competence of governments and other agencies to pre-design the evolution of the economic system and markets. In doing so, it nevertheless identifies general...

Despite the global spread of autocratic elections, formal modeling has been lacking on regime transitions to and from electoral authoritarianism. Building on the formal literature on democratization, this paper introduces a model in which a dictator chooses between closed authoritarianism,...

Discussing fundamental issues on the ethical foundation of public economic policy, this paper arrives at conclusions that will surprise most economists. While reviewing relevant contributions, it argues for happiness as the ultimate objective, in contrast to economists' preference for...

Discussing fundamental issues on the ethical foundation of public economic policy, this paper arrives at conclusions that will surprise most economists. While reviewing relevant contributions, it argues for happiness as the ultimate objective, in contrast to economists' preference for...

We examine the incentives for integration between two nations of different sizes in a set up similar to Alesina and Spolaore (2003): individuals are indexed by location, each nation (comprising of individuals) is an interval, and the public good in each nation is provided from its capital -...