The starting point of our research is Piketty (2014) who follows Marx by asserting that rents are merely one of the forms of profits, therefore they do not require separate conceptual analysis and statistical separation. Speaking of the generation of rents (as a distinctly different mechanism...

Equity in health has to be distinguished from equity in access to health care, or equity in the distribution of health care resources. We take as a working definition of health for our purposes the number of quality adjusted life years that a person may expect to enjoy over his or her lifetime....

This chapter explains how the generation of renewable energy and the creation of sustainable communities can guide capitalism to survive climate change on a self-reinforcing basis. The process depends upon introducing an ecological “use it or lose it” rule for owning money, land, buildings...

This paper explores the problem of envy (“sadness at another's good”) from both theological and economic perspectives. The theological analysis helps show why envy is a perennial feature of human existence and an ongoing problem for ordered and flourishing social life. The economic analysis...

Written for the Chapman Law Review Symposium on “What Can Law & Economics Teach Us About the Corporate Social Responsibility Debate?,” this Article applies the lessons of public choice theory to examine corporate social responsibility. The Article adopts a broad definition of corporate...

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...

In a remarkably simple and yet in one of the most original and insightful observations of 20th century economics, Gordon Tullock observed that there are efficiency losses when public policies and political behavior create contestable rents. Tullock also observed that social losses from...

Duality methods of linear and convex programming are applied to impute definite marginal values to the fixed inputs of a hydroelectric plant from the operating profit. Our earlier analysis of pumped storage (of energy and other cyclically priced goods) is thus extended to valuation of an...

Economists have long recognized the need for durability-enhancing mechanisms to facilitate political exchange, but the focus has been almost entirely on mechanisms that raise the cost of reneging on bargains once they have been struck. What happens if these mechanisms fail? This paper argues...