Through tax evasion, through the labour-leisure choice or in other ways, taxpayers reduce the tax base in response to an increase in the tax rate. The process is commonly-believed to generate a humped Laffer curve with a revenue-maximizing tax rate well short of 100%. That need not be so. In the...

Among the many interpretations of real national income are (1) the return to national wealth and (2) the Hamiltonian of an appropriately-chosen dynamic model of the economy. These interpretations are sometiems alleged to be equivalent and to constitute the self-evidently ideal definition to...

We know that people strike bargains and that civilized life could not proceed otherwise. Bargaining models yield solutions comparable to the general equilibrium in a competitive economy with universal self-interested behaviour subject only to economy-wide rules. Such models can be based upon a...

One votes from self-interest or from a sense of duty. Voting from self-interest requires there to be some chance, however small, that one's vote swings the outcome of an election from one political party to another. This paper is a discussion of three models of what that chance might be: the...

We know that people strike bargains and that civilized life could not proceed otherwise. We do not know how bargains are struck. We have no explanation of bargaining, comparable to the general equilibrium in the economy, accounting for essential features of bargaining as we know it with...

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 funds...

A common, though by no means universally-accepted doctrine among practitioners of law and economics is that redistribution is no business of the law. This efficiency-only doctrine is not that redistribution is unworthy as a social objective, but that any given benefit to the poor is attainable...