Public interest journalism plays a crucial role in promoting the quality of public life, protecting individuals from misconduct on the part of government and the private sector, and giving real content to the public's ‘right to know'.Its vitality and sustainability into the future are...

In Shapiro and Pincus (2008), we proposed a method for arriving at just compensation of private owners of urban land, in cases like Kelo v New London, in which government has plans to use eminent domain to `take' private properties, to be assembled into a single parcel for some public purpose....

Human rights theorists and economists have tended to talk past, rather than to, each other, especially in the field of development. On one level this is to be expected. Human rights theory adopts a normative, deontological approach, while economists see their discipline as a positive science and...

"For economists, the main test of a microeconomic policy change is its effect on efficiency: gains minus losses, equally weighted. However, it is standard economics that individuals value losses more than gains. Moreover, imposing large, uncompensated and uninsurable policy-induced losses would...

A small but important part of Buchanan's work is focussed on issues relating to federalism. This includes the early equalisation grants paper (from his doctoral dissertation), the midcareer papers on Tiebout processes and the later paper on fiscal cartels in The Power to Tax (1980). The aim of...