Mainstream academic economists fall disproportionately into two opposing groups. In one of these groups, the members see free markets as tending to fail relative to formal theoretical conditions for optimality. In the other group, the members see free markets as tending to work better than any...

It is not fruitful to puzzle over the question whether economists and others ‘favor’ or ‘lean’ toward the regulatory or welfare state; that is an unhelpful and confusing question, one that orients people in the wrong way. It is better to begin by emphasizing that the first should be...

This essay takes issue with the idea that liberals are necessarily enamored with either regulation or large government programs. It argues that regulations to protect workers and consumers become necessary in a context where the rules have been written to disadvantage them. Different rules can...

This paper argues that the welfare state and regulation are not inevitably in harmony. In the post-Keynesian period of ‘austerity,’ the tendency is for state regulation to focus more on supporting market-creating activities of capital than of market-controlling features that would protect...

Economists view activist government policy and social insurance as potentially protecting individuals from risks and from market failure. Perhaps differences among economists in support for activist government policy in social insurance and regulation reflect differences in beliefs about the...

I suggest that the growing divide between economists on the left and right reflects three factors: epistemic differences (that is, differences in assessing empirical matters), values, and tribalism. I begin by sketching out a simple model to explain the epistemic divide between economists on the...

In the United States, on matters of the welfare state and the regulatory state, virtually no economist favors one while opposing the other. Such pattern is a common and intuitive impression, and is supported by scatterplots of survey data. But what explains the pattern? Why don’t some...

The propositions advanced by Marx and Smith on the relation between labor and prices are examined, with particular emphasis on income distribution, within a non-Walrasian setting including joint production and heterogeneous labor. Among its contributions, the paper introduces the concept of...

Due to the ongoing debate regarding the definitions and measurement of cyberbullying, the present article critically appraises the existing literature and offers direction regarding the question of how best to conceptualise peer-to-peer abuse in a cyber context. Variations across definitions are...

Although principals are ultimately held accountable to student learning in their buildings, the most consistent research results have suggested that their impact on student achievement is largely indirect. Leithwood, Patten, and Jantzi proposed four paths through which this indirect influence...