In nineteenth-century France, the nature and functions of the State were an almost constant subject of debate among liberal economists. The aim of this paper is to analyse and restate some hitherto neglected discussions and to discover some bold ideas that could form the hallmarks of a French...

Alan Peacock describes his entry into postwar British Economics, as an undergraduate at St. Andrews and a lecturer at London School of Economics. His personal involvement with, and development of, Public Economics is outlined.

The State, viewed as an exponent of constraint, in opposition to the Market, free by definition, represents the tough nucleus of the theoretical space dedicated to the State in the economic science. What we intend in this paper is to discover how, when looking for the “right measure” of the...

We examine the US state-level pattern of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) spending. We relate spending to (1) Keynesian determinants of countercyclical policy, (2) congressional power and dominance, and (3) presidential electoral vote importance. We find that the ARRA is, in...

This paper investigates local government consolidations with a focus on public choice aspects in the decision-making. Politicians could lose future payoffs if their locality merges with a larger counterpart, and they may sabotage the merger process. The analysis with data from 3,212 Japanese...

Distributional equity concerns are often at least as important as economic efficiency and ecological sustainability in environmental and natural resource management policies. Until recently, however, economists have shied away from tackling equity issues, primarily because equity appeared as a...

This paper examines the problem of renegotiation of infrastructure concessions in Latin America using a model of litigation with an application to incentive contracts. Opportunistic renegotiation is here defined as a rent seeking game, to show the effect of the legal system characteristics in...

Gordon Tullock has been one of the most important founders and contributors to Public Choice. Two innovations are typical “Tullock Challenges”. The first relates to method: the measurement of subjective well-being, or happiness. The second relates to digital social networks such as Facebook,...

This study analyzes leading research in behavioral economics to see whether it contains advocacy of paternalism and whether it addresses the potential cognitive limitations and biases of the policymakers who are going to implement paternalist policies. The findings reveal that 20.7% of the...