This paper investigates the industrial organization of criminal enterprise. We argue that differences in contestability across criminal industries crucially shape how producers in these industries organize. In more contestable criminal industries, producers use organizational hierarchy as a...

Self-interest seeking leads stronger individuals to plunder weaker ones. But could it also lead them to do so in ways that minimize plunder's social inefficiency? We argue that when contracts between enemies are enforceable and transaction costs are low, plunderers and their victims benefit from...

This paper reviews our combined experiences teaching a graduate-level course in development economics. Our goal is to provide an overview of the course with an emphasis on the connection with Austrian themes. Due to the natural trajectory of the field of development economics, a course in this...

Violent conflict destroy resources. It generates "destruction costs." These costs have an important effect on individual's decisions to cooperate or conflict. We develop two models of conflict: one in which conflict's destruction costs are independent of individuals' investment in "arms" - the...

Existing studies of entrepreneurship focus on entrepreneurs whose individual contribution to wealth creation is typically trivial: self-employed persons. This paper investigates entrepreneurs whose individual contribution to wealth creation is enormous: billionaires. We explore the relationship...

Foreign aid's advocates claim aid has been successful. Aid's critics claim aid has failed. We explain why both camps are correct. Aid can, and in a few cases has, increased a particular output by devoting more resources to its production. In this sense, aid has occasionally had limited success....

Gustav Ranis addresses our recent article in this journal where we argued that foreign aid is unable to solve the economic problem and thus unable to make poor countries rich (Skarbek and Leeson 2009). The following quotations from his article summarize his main objections to our argument:...

Violent conflict destroys resources. It generates “destruction costs.” These costs have an important effect on individuals' decisions to cooperate or conflict. We develop two models of conflict: one in which conflict's destruction costs are independent of individuals' investments in...

We conceive of political economy, historical and contemporary, as reflecting sometimes competing and other times complementary assessments of the appropriate role of the state in economic life grounded in alternative approaches to the paradox of government. We call these differing approaches and...

This paper examines how productive entrepreneurial activities, such as innovation, influence unproductive entrepreneurial activities, such as regulatory rent seeking. We argue that the former may increase the latter. Confronted with a situation in which innovation erodes their monopoly returns,...