This paper seeks to explain the initial successes and failures of Protestantism on economic grounds. It argues that the medieval Roman Catholic Church, through doctrinal manipulation, the exclusion of rivals, and various forms of price discrimination, ultimately placed members seeking the Z good...

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Innovation enables monopolists to lower their costs, expand their outputs, and reduce their prices. It is conventional to conclude that social welfare unambiguously increases as a result. Assuming linear demand and marginal cost, this paper shows, however, that innovation raises the opportunity...

This article considers whether presale auction estimates are unbiased predictors of price when “no-sales” are considered utilizing a newly constructed sample of over 500 works by eight early twentieth-century American artists. Unbiased presale auction estimates in predicting price, while...

In this paper we present a point voting system with declining weights on votes Abstract for the representation of spillover interests among governments in a federalist system. In theory our model represents a formalization in terms of voting of Musgrave's proposal of varying benefit taxes to...

In a 1971 paper Kramer attempted to establish empirically that macroeconomic variables have a significant impact on the vote shares received by Democratic and Republican congressional candidates. He found mixed results, with the growth rate in per capita real income and the inflation rate being...

This article is about addiction control. Using the economic theory of labor market tournaments, the authors derive the positive characteristics of an addiction control tournament and compare the effectiveness of a tournament versus self-constraining methods of addiction control. The authors also...

This article investigates the impact of earmarking on tax revenues. By dedicat-ing revenues to a particular purpose, earmarking overcomes a free-rider problem among interest groups. The group receiving the benefits of the dedi cated revenues has a strong incentive to lobby for higher effective...

Using National Football League (NFL) data from 1987 to 2007, we examine the hiring of African American head coaches. Our results partly support an innovation explanation in that integration proceeded more rapidly in larger population centers. In contrast, we find only mixed and weak evidence...