After an extensive discussion of the nature of the interactions among unions, corporations, and government, we find that government in granting privileges to workers organized into unions implicitly taxes capital formation. The result has been to lessen the attention business decisions pay to...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...

Fiscal policy has become quite controversial in the post-Keynesian era, the debate over the Obama stimulus package being a contentious recent example. Some pundits go so far as to take the position that macroeconomic theory has failed to meaningfully progress in terms of providing useful...

The optimal size of an urban area is a controversial topic. We take optimal urban size to be that which minimizes net costs of city size, with larger cities first having various economies of scale (e.g. waste pickup) then later diseconomies of scale (e.g. pollution, congestion)

I argue here that the cash asset proportion falls with increased wealth using data from the 1962 Survey of Consumer Finances. This result is at odds with what would be expected under Arrow's Increasing Relative Risk Aversion hypothesis and is also at odds with Friedman's assertions that money is...

We argue here that Arrow's Increasing Relative Risk Aversion hypothesis is both theoretically unappealing and is, moreover, not supported by empirical evidence. The results also have implications for the demand for money, namely that money is a normal, but not a superior good contrary to the...

Suburbanization has many causes, among which is the attempt to relocate to acquire a more desirable vector of local public goods. The traditional economists' procedure for valuing public goods involves vertical aggregation of marginal willingness to pay, at a given income level. This approach is...

There is increasing recognition of an apparent paradox with respect to certain dimensions of environmental quality. Some measures of environmental quality, with US air quality being the focus here, have clearly improved over time. However, at the same time that this improvement has occurred,...