Economic self-interest and social considerations are the key determinants of public support for market reforms in transition countries. However, political strategies that rely mainly on public support for pushing through economic reforms have limited relevance if the prevailing institutional...

Sub-Saharan Africa has received tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid over the last fifty years yet economic development has remained elusive. In many countries absolute poverty has increased and life expectancy has declined. Karol Boudreaux and Paul Aligica argue that the results of...

The main thesis of this article is that individuals should own their user-held data. Rapidly developing data processing technologies empowers individuals to collect their data from different sources and retain it in personal data clouds. Such user-held data represents the most accurate,...

We develop a critique of government interventionism based on the Misesian calculation argument against socialism. If private property rights and relative prices based on supply and demand are necessary for successful economic coordination, then conventional market failure theories cannot be...

This article discusses and analyzes the sources and methods used by Leon Duguit in constructing the social-obligation or social-function norm of property as set out in an influential series of lectures in Buenos Aires published in 1912. The work of Henri Hayem has been underappreciated in the...

Ronald Coase merged two traditions in economics, marginalism and institutionalism. Neoclassical economics in the 1930s was characterized by an abstract conception of marginalism and frictionless resource movement. Marginal analysis did not seek to uncover the source of individual human...

News media reports on eminent domain often highlight outrage and heated protest. But these accounts, Debbie Becher finds, obscure a much more complex reality of how Americans understand property. Private Property and Public Power (Oxford University Press, 2014) presents the first comprehensive...

This is the text of the Chancellor Dunning Trust Lecture as it was delivered on Oct. 4, 2006.