James M. Buchanan Jr. is among the 71 individuals who were awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel between 1969 and 2012. This ideological profile is part of the project called “The Ideological Migration of the Economics Laureates,” which fills the...

Much political conflict in the world revolves around the issue of how much freedom to accord people. Liberal democracies are characterized by, e.g., the rule of law and a strong protection of civil rights, giving individuals a great deal of legally guaranteed freedom to lead their lives as they...

The present paper consists of two closely related parts: one which outlines a normative criterion for evaluating the legitimacy of constitutional change and one which specifies a particular proposal of a constitution. The criterion used stems directly from the "pragmatic" brand of...

Since the early 1980s a wave of liberalizing reforms has swept over the world. While the stated motivation for these reforms has usually been to increase economic efficiency, some critics have instead inferred ulterior motives and a desire to enrich certain (already rich) people at the expense...

Religious beliefs and practices influence individual lives and societies in many ways. We study how religion affects self-assessed health, which in turn is important for both individual well-being and productivity. A religious background predicts worse health. As the previous literature has not...

We highlight a new factor behind integration: tolerance in the immigrants’ background culture. We hypothesize that it is easier to partake of economic, civic-political and social life in a new country for a person stemming from a culture that embodies tolerance towards people who are...

Social and cultural determinants of economic institutions and outcomes have come to the forefront of economic research. We introduce religiosity, measured as the share for which religion is important in daily life, to explain institutional quality in the form of property rights and the rule of...

How does economic freedom, mainly how property rights are designed and protected, relate to income equality? Whilst this is argued to be theoretically ambiguous, the empirical results reveal that there is a positive relationship between changes in economic freedom and equality: the more a...

The present paper consists of two closely related parts: one which outlines a normative criterion for evaluating the legitimacy of constitutional change and one which specifies a particular proposal of a constitution. The criterion used stems directly from the 'pragmatic' brand of...