Economists do not understand how bargains are struck. A bargain is the sharing of a pie between two or more people who are collectively entitled to the pie but cannot appropriate it until they agree how large each person's slice is to be. We know that people do strike bargains and that civilized...

An ideal planner would follow the original Samuelson rule: to undertake each and every public project, program or activity up to the point where the sum of its marginal benefits is just equal to its marginal cost. Actual governments modify the rule in response to the marginal cost of public...

A reasonable and fair interpretation of the mandate for equalization payments in Section 36(2) of the Canadian Constitution differs from the present equalization formula in these respects: Transfers to the poorer provinces would be financed by transfers from the richer provinces rather than from...

Citizen-candidate models of representative government postulate that any citizen may become a candidate for office, that a winner is chosen from among the candidates by voting with ties broken by the flip of a coin, that all voters have preferences among a set of policies and that the...

Disputes over the marginal cost of public funds may be about its magnitude in any given time and place or about its role in cost-benefit analysis. This paper is about the latter. The Samuelson rule was devised for an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent government. This paper is about how the...

Public provision of private goods is usually analysed as the displacement of a market, where people can buy as much or as little of a good as they please, with tax financed provision by the government of equal and identical amounts of the good per person. But publivc provision is not always...

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Chinese historians speak of dynastic cycles where periods of economic progress and decline coincide with the rise and fall of families of rulers, while economists speak of societies without technical change or involuntary unemployment as evolving into stationary states. This paper alters the...