Elected representatives have little incentive to pursue the interests of those electing them once they are elected. This well-known principle-agent problem leads, in a variety of theories of government, to nonoptimally large levels of government expenditure. An implication is that budgetary...

Fiscal policy has become quite controversial in the post-Keynesian era, the debate over the Obama stimulus package being a contentious recent example. Some pundits go so far as to take the position that macroeconomic theory has failed to meaningfully progress in terms of providing useful...

The paper employs statistical hypothesis tests to explore the question of whether natural hazards (hail and tornadoes being considered here) are or are not intertemporally random. The answer to this question, at least for these two hazards, is surprising and has important policy implications:...

The paper examines the role of self-ownership versus other ownership of labor with implications for the interpretation of the historical evidence regarding timing of black migration from the South to the North after emancipation

Mandatory deposits on beverage containers have received enthusiastic support among environmentalists as a means of controlling litter. In modeling the effects of a deposit on litter generation and recovery it is found that this enthusiasm is well justified. Interestingly enough, few supporters...

Controversy has surrounded the role exports play in stimulating economic growth. Some authors find causation from exports to GNP, while others have concluded that exports retard GNP growth. Still others find no causation or find bidirectional causation with the Sims test but not with the Granger...

Fiscal policy has become quite controversial in the post-Keynesian era, the debate over the Obama stimulus package being a contentious recent example. Some pundits go so far as to take the position that macroeconomic theory has failed to meaningfully progress in terms of providing useful...

After an extensive discussion of the nature of the interactions among unions, corporations, and government, we find that government in granting privileges to workers organized into unions implicitly taxes capital formation. The result has been to lessen the attention business decisions pay to...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...