Tolerance is a distinguishing feature of Western culture: There is a widespread attitude that people should be allowed to say what they want even if one dislikes the message. Still, the degree of tolerance varies between and within countries, as well as over time, and if one values this kind of...

For Piketty there are two laws of capitalism and one fundamental inequality which, taken together, drive us towards a world of increasing inequality. For what is left of the twenty-first century he foresees a less meritocratic society with an enhanced role for inherited wealth. In this article I...

The market economy has three pillars: voluntary exchange, purposive rules of the game, and the rule of law. According to classical works by Smith, Rousseau, Hayek and Friedman followed by empirical research by various contemporary economists, the common law system is more conducive to the rule...

Most contemporary moral defenses of capitalism rely on ideas drawn from the modern philosophic tradition that emerged in the 17th-18th centuries. Almost always, advocates of a free market society have either invoked the notion of a social contract, a theory of natural rights, the insistence that...

In 2005, the Supreme Court decided Lochner v. New York, striking down a maximum hour law as violating the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court's ruling in Lochner gave enhanced constitutional protection to liberty of contract, while taking a restrictive view of the police...

There is an extensive literature on the presence of valuable natural resources creating a competition for control of central states and resource rents. This mechanism has been argued to be an important underlying factor preventing certain countries from acquiring good institutions and achieving...

One of the most often committed mistakes in economic reasoning is the supposition about continuity of economic processes. Yet what dominates in reality is the process of permanent changes which sometimes happen not in a linear but in a cascade way. It must be acknowledged that the capitalist...

Spanish Abstract: Las micro, pequeñas y medianas empresas (MIPYMES), representan el mayor número de organizaciones en el tejido empresarial mundial. En el marco del proceso de estandarización contable internacional promovido por el IASB, surge la Norma Internacional de Información Financiera...

This paper studies aggregate dynamics in a cobweb model where learning takes place through a selection mechanism, by which more successful firms are replicated at a higher rate. The structure of the model allows to characterize analytically the aggregate dynamics, and to compute the effect on...

As U.S. corporate profit margins have made it to record highs, a debate has raged between those who place their hopes on a new paradigm of sustained high profits and those who believe in capitalism's efficiency and the tendency of margins to revert to the mean. Using a bottoms-up analysis...