The quest for benefit from existing wealth or by seeking privileged benefit through influence over policy is known as rent seeking. Much rent seeking activity involves government and political decisions and is therefore in the domain of political economy, although it can also take place in...

The Ramsey rule for optimal excise taxation suggests that goods should be taxed in inverse proportion to their elasticities of demand. This analysis shows that when the political process that determines tax rates is taken into account, the Ramsey rule may not be superior to a fiscal constitution...

Our original article noted that auctions of pollution rights could increase a tendency toward monopoly in the offending industry. Professor Oates has provided some insightful comments in arguing for auctions rather than Pigouvian taxes, but the validity of the argument in our original article is...

Modern national income accounting was designed in the early 20th century for the purpose of providing improved indicators about the performance of the economy so that government policy makers could better control the economy. The way that performance is measured affects the types of policies...

Administrators at many universities are using the National Research Council’s (NRC’s) measures of departmental performance to assess the performance of their economics departments. The NRC methodology measures faculty publications, citations, and grants in specific ways, which...

Introduction The response of aggregate labour supply to changes in the real wage has been a question of interest to economists for some time. For example, the notion of a backward‐bending supply curve for labour is commonly known, though not universally accepted. The question is of more than...