In this paper we argue that policy in relation to education has relied too extensively on the more easily measured costs of production to support a common conclusion of economies of scale in school and/or district size. We argue that there are external costs that increase with size but that can...

This paper investigates one aspect of the relationship between school size and education outcomes-- whether school size is associated with youth violence. The importance of this question is underlined by the prevalent view that large school sizes are needed to realize production scale economies....

In this paper the case made by Klein (1975) and Hayek (1976) for competitive bank monies is reconsidered. To do so we build a model of the demand for bank money that derives from money’s ability to separate commodity purchases from sales across time and so avoid the trading costs implied by...

Part of Introduction: The question whether society can readily substitute public action for private initiative with respect to public goods is still very much open. Bergstrom, Blume and Varian (1986, hereafter BBV) and Andreoni (1993) challenge the proposition that government provision "crowds...

From at least 1893 economists have viewed income as an important determinant of government size and the hypothesis that government size increases with income is now enshrined in the literature as Wagner’s Law. More recently, however, public choice economists and growth theorists have tended to...

In this paper the proposal for indirect convertibility (henceforth, IC)] put forward by Greenfield and Yeager (1983, 1989) is reexamined and reinterpreted to show that IC can provide a practical monetary policy rule for central banks currently engaged in inflation targeting. One reason for such...