"For almost a decade, economists Kevin M. Simmons and Daniel Sutter have been studying the economic impacts and social consequences of the approximately 1,200 tornadoes that touch down across the United States annually. During this time, Simmons and Sutter have been compiling information from...

I explore the comparative vulnerability of regimes to a coup d'etat using a game-theoretic model. Analysis centers on leaders of groups capable of intervening at the time of a coup. I prove the existence of an equilibrium in which a coup is attempted without restrictions on current government...

Research on the presence of consumer racial discrimination in the baseball labor and memorabilia markets have produced contradictory empirical results. While studies of baseball salaries find evidence of discrimination, Nardinelli and Simon (1990) and Andersen and LaCroix (1991) use data from...

For more than 70 years, a strand of Keynesian thought has maintained that the cure for economic depressions is merely a matter of simple arithmetic. According to these Keynesians, the government need only increase spending by an amount equal to the ratio of the output gap to the fiscal...

Objective: In 1978 Congress weakened several key provisions of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which had been enacted only five years earlier. The objective is to compare alternative explanations for this policy reversal. Methods: Probit and multinomial logit models are used to explain...

Spontaneous or emergent orders in human affairs are based upon voluntary interactions among individuals. Yet the physical environment influences the subsequent interactions which occur. While the interactions may be voluntary, the confines of a built environment – physical systems and...

The failure of economic central planning in the Soviet Union is interpreted as evidence of the impossibility of efficient central planning. But the deficiencies of the Soviet economy might have resulted from other factors, such as Soviet history, culture, leadership, and/or unique circumstances,...

Medicaid was established in 1965 as a joint state and federal program to provide medical insurance to Americans who are poor and have disabilities, and it has grown from 1percent to 3 percent of GDP. The source of Medicaid s growth over the past 50 years must inform efforts to reform the program...