This essay asks whether business firms should be treated as moral or legal persons, capable of bearing rights and duties as distinct entities. Building on earlier work describing firms as relational contracts in performance (Adelstein 2010), it considers the nature of legal and moral...

This essay asks what firms are, whether they are ‘real’ social actors, and whether their actions can be traced without remainder to the actions of living people or whether there is some irreducible aspect of their existence or operation that must be attributed to the organization itself. It...

If the type of work undertaken while young affects either development of human capital or preferences, then early work experiences may have measurable effects on later life outcomes. This paper examines whether or not having a job as a teenager, and whether or not it is a childoriented job,...

This essay draws on the transaction costs model of the firm and an Austrian perspective on the knowledge problem in centrally planned orders to propose an empirically useful Austrian theory of central planning. Afteran initial review of existing theories of the firm, part two develops insights...

Recent changes to the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards in the United States mandate substantial improvement in automobile fuel economy over the next fteen years. One of the ways that manufacturers improve fuel economy is to lower vehicle weights, which has impacts on safety. The...

Formal microfinance institutions have been an important tool in the fight against poverty in developing countries, but their reach is necessarily limited. Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) are an alternative, informal mechanism for saving and borrowing that do not require external...

This paper makes use of long-run restrictions to identify macroeconomic shocks and evaluate their relative importance for exchange rate fluctuations. Unlike previous studies that employ a similar approach, I consider a large eight variable vector autoregressive system that includes short term...

We examine the effects of party platforms on the economic opportunities of firms using a unique data set from a political prediction market in Taiwan, a country with two dominant parties whose political cleavage derives mainly from a single issue: the “One China Principle”. We find that...