This paper examines empirically the state-level impact of capital punishment on multiple murder rates for the period 1995–1999. In baseline tests—tests employing mixed panel data and using an estimation technique combining aspects of both fixed- and random-effects models—we show that...

This article examines systematically the growth of the English language from the year 252 ce through 1985. Using a data set collected from the CD-ROM version of the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, we characterize the time series of new words added to the language, by year,...

The Alchian and Allen theorem predicts that it will be harder to find "good" apples in the State of Washington, a prime apple-growing region, than in, say, New York City, where the addition of shipping charges makes "bad" apples comparatively more expensive. We recast the theorem as a testable...

The Catholic Church reacted to the Protestant Reformation by taking on the defensive posture of an incumbent-firm monopoly fighting to survive in the face of new competition. Contemporary firms typically respond to rival entry by rewriting their corporate charter. So did the medieval Catholic...

This paper seeks to explain the initial successes and failures of Protestantism on economic grounds. It argues that the medieval Roman Catholic Church, through doctrinal manipulation, the exclusion of rivals, and various forms of price discrimination, ultimately placed members seeking the Z good...

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Innovation enables monopolists to lower their costs, expand their outputs, and reduce their prices. It is conventional to conclude that social welfare unambiguously increases as a result. Assuming linear demand and marginal cost, this paper shows, however, that innovation raises the opportunity...

This article considers whether presale auction estimates are unbiased predictors of price when “no-sales” are considered utilizing a newly constructed sample of over 500 works by eight early twentieth-century American artists. Unbiased presale auction estimates in predicting price, while...

In this paper we present a point voting system with declining weights on votes Abstract for the representation of spillover interests among governments in a federalist system. In theory our model represents a formalization in terms of voting of Musgrave's proposal of varying benefit taxes to...