Does the emergence of a stock market require a well-developed legal and/or regulatory system? Although historical work by Neal and Davis (2005) and Stringham (2003) suggests that securities markets have successfully developed with little government oversight, numerous authors (including Black, 2001;...

Frey [2001] and others propose subjecting governments to competition within their jurisdiction, but classical liberals argue that having competing law enforcers cannot work. This article describes a hybrid system that relies on markets but has one law enforcement agency per region, with profit...

After Czech voucher privatization many companies simply ignored the interests of their shareholders. The government has since increased the amount of regulation, but they have failed to establish significant investor confidence. This article offers some explanations of why their legal centric...

A number of theorists assume that drinking has harmful economic effects, but data show that drinking and earnings are positively correlated. We hypothesize that drinking leads to higher earnings by increasing social capital. If drinkers have larger social networks, their earnings should...

The political economy of Ludwig von Mises and Frederic Bastiat has been largely ignored even by their admirers. We argue that Mises' and Bastiat's views in this area were both original and insightful. While traditional public choice generally maintains that democracy fails because voters' views...