The "Lake Wobegon Effect'' describes the potential bias introduced into survey-based analyses of education issues, because students systematically over-report academic achievements such as grade-point average. While the use of official-records data negates this effect, many researchers can only...

This paper examines the views of three prominent Wisconsin progressives – Richard T. Ely, Tomas Sewall Adams, and John R. Commons – on taxes as social policy. Wisconsin emerged as a national progressive leader in the 1890s – a ‘laboratory of democracy’ that produced the nation’s...

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the book that established the field of public choice – The Calculus of Consent by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. The year is also the thirtieth anniversary of Elinor Ostrom’s “Covenants With and Without a Sword,” in which she...

Leveraging a “quasi-experiment” where some of the faculty at a U.S. university unexpectedly saw their teaching loads increase, we test whether the steeper requirement affected student evaluations of teaching (SET). Using the university’s aggregated SET, we find the instructors assigned...

In this paper, I consider the role women economists played in the production of U.S. income and tax distribution studies over three decades beginning in the 1920s. Although related to and clearly influenced by consumption economics, these studies evolved along the boundaries of three distinct...

Ursula Kathleen Webb Hicks (1896 – 1985) was Oxford’s Lecturer in Public Finance for nearly twenty years. She published a dozen books on public finance. She co-founded the Review of Economic Studies and served as managing editor for twenty-eight years, making her the first woman editor of a...

The intellectual competitors to liberalism that appeared in the late nineteenth century often failed to clearly differentiate themselves in popular and academic discourse. Progressivism and socialism both found foothold with promises to transform the economy and society via an activist state;...