Both criminal and regulatory law have traditionally been skeptical of what Jeremy Bentham referred to as evidentiary offenses – the prohibition (or regulation) of some activity not because it is wrong, but because it probabilistically (but not universally) indicates that a real wrong has...

In the presence of uncertainty about what a country can be good at producing, there can be great social value to discovering costs of domestic activities because such discoveries can be easily imitated. We develop a general-equilibrium framework for a small open economy to clarify the analytical...

The Doha Round is intended to advance the interests of developing countries but it has run into problems because additional liberalization in sectors of interest to some developing countries could erode the preferences of others. None of the current proposals to deal with the issue, either...

Why don't people in rich nations do more to help people in poor nations? Large disparities in material well-being across the globe are sobering. Nearly 800 million people do not get enough food, leaving nearly one third of the world's children malnourished (United Nations Development Programme,...

This paper presents a theory of inflation in commodity money and supports it by evidence from inflationary episodes in France during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The paper shows that commodity money can be inflated similarly to fiat money through repeated debasements, which act like...

Over the last several years, many have called for an internationalization of Internet governance in general, and Internet naming and numbering in particular. The multi-year WSIS process that culminated in November 2005 was intended to create momentum in such direction. The United States has long...

My goal here is twofold: First, I wish to make a plea for the relevance of moral considerations in debates about immigration. Too often, immigration debates are conducted solely from the standpoint of "what is good for us," without regard for the justifiability of immigration policies to those...

This paper is one of a number of case studies prepared for an interdisciplinary seminar on religion in American civic life which examined the roles and functions of religion in congregations and communities. “The Catholic Puzzle” is the apparent discrepancy between the Catholic church’s...

In 1999, the Children's Scholarship Fund (CSF) announced that it would award scholarships enabling low-income families across the United States to send their children in grades K-8 to the private school of their choice. The families of over 1.25 million children applied for scholarships; 40,000...

We analyze changes in the determinants of family income between 1961 and 1999, focusing on the effect of parental education, occupational rank, income, marital status, family size, region of residence, race, and ethnicity. Our data, which cover respondents between the ages of thirty and...