From the standpoint of modern economics, the “marvel” of the price system is the way in which contextual knowledge is discovered and utilized without requiring individuals to articulate and transmit any great part of it to a central planner. While extremely valuable, this insight has tended to...

To varying degrees, most municipalities regulate urban development with zoning, density restrictions, and parking requirements. Such policies restrict the housing supply and urban density relative to what it could be in a free market. In this paper, we review the literature that measures the...

Economic success depends on institutions that favor competition and openness to innovation. This is well understood in the private sector and could also be applied to government. For example, New Orleans faces the tough challenge of rebuilding after the Hurricane Katrina disaster. An influx of...

Public choice relies heavily on equilibrium analysis in its models of government failure. Austrians are suspicious of equilibrium analysis owing to its reliance on some variant of the perfect-knowledge assumption. To what extent then can Austrians consistently embrace public-choice descriptions...