This working paper provides a survey of the theoretical underpinnings for the various employment guarantee schemes, and discusses full employment policy experiences in the United States, Sweden, India, Argentina, and France. The theoretical and policy developments are delineated in a historical...

This is an entirely new draft of the sixth chapter of my book 'Foundations of Evolutionary Economics' which is going to be published by Edward Elgar in due course. With permission of the publisher, the draft chapters are posted on the web to facilitate academic discussion for further...

A popular misconception among scholars of Adam Smith holds that he thought that government intervention was a good and natural aspect of civil society. Scholars who have this misconception argue that Smith often portrays politicians and government intervention as being benevolent. But there are...

Since the early days of the republic, state and local governments have periodically embarked on widespread, large-scale attempts to spur economic growth through targeted economic development subsidies. Interestingly, the constitutions of nearly every state in the union contain provisions that,...

The paper reconsiders the nature of mining districts and property rights during the California gold rush. According to a widely accepted view advanced by Umbeck (1977, 1981), in the absence of effective legal authority, district codes established secure property rights in mining claims. Drawing...

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...

The rise of the “New History of Capitalism” as a subfield of historical studies has magnified differences between economists and historians which started to grow during the 1970s. We describe what is and what is not new about the “New History of Capitalism,” and explain how the different...

This paper offers a framework for studying how violence determines political systems and market types in pairs to explain the nature of and road to the (Smithian) market. In the modeled Hobbesian society, parties prepare for war to acquire wealth but end in war or peace depending on their...

The Israeli Ultra-Orthodox population doubles each seventeen years. With 60% of prime-aged males attending Yeshiva rather than working, that community is rapidly outgrowing its resources. Why do fathers with families in poverty choose Yeshiva over work? Draft deferments subsidize Yeshiva...

Economics and history both strive to understand causation: economics using instrumental variables econometrics and history by weighing the plausibility of alternative narratives. Instrumental variables can lose value with repeated use because of an econometric tragedy of the commons bias: each...