We analyze incentive-efficient government bailouts within a canonical model of intra-firm moral hazard. Bailouts exacerbate the moral hazard of firms and managers in two ways. First, they make them less averse to failing. Second, the taxes to fund bailouts dampen their incentives. Nevertheless,...

Although common economic wisdom suggests that government bailouts are inefficient because they reduce incentives to avoid failure and induce excessive entry by marginal firms, in practice bailouts are difficult to avoid for systemically significant enterprises. Recent experience suggests that...

This article addresses the question of whether sanctions constitute violence in the broad sense of that term, and whether, and under what conditions, sanctions can be justified. The sanctions imposed against Iraq and Cuba are discussed as case studies and several ethical theories are applied to...

Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) was an economist and journalist. A member of the French Liberal School, he is best known for his free trade ideas and his philosophy of law. Mark Blaug ranks him as one of the 100 greatest economists before Keynes. Schumpeter called him a brilliant economic...

Keynes is back. President Obama's economic stimulus package is based on the premise that we can spend our way out of recession. It is an application of the Keynesian multiplier theory, which was expounded in Keynes' 1936 economic treatise, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money....

We study the incentives to expropriate foreign capital under democracy and oligarchy. We model a two-sector small open economy where foreign investment triggers Stolper-Samuelson effects through reducing exporting costs. We show how incentives to expropriate depend on the distributional effects...

Perpetual property rights to land, structures, corporations and money allows investors to be overpaid to create inefficiencies and inequities in a way not measured by accountants and little noticed by economists. All intellectual property rights have limited life. Most assets depreciate over...

Economics as a social science is about exchange and the institutions within which exchange relationships are formed and transactions are executed. Yoram Barzel's contribution to economics and political economy reflect this focus on exchange and institutions. In this paper, I will sketch a theory...

The article takes as a starting point the notion that there are two ways of approaching the issue of ideas and institutional design from an Ostromian perspective. The first is straightforward: simply follow the explicit arguments developed by them and synthesize the main points made over time...

This paper suggests that attitudes towards markets can account for the stickiness of institutions of civil freedom. This proposition rests on three insights. The first is that the provision of different civil freedoms is determined by rent-seeking activities. The second is that “civil” and...