With the passage of Act 48 in May 2011, Vermont has become the first U.S. state to enact a law for a universal, publicly financed health care system. The state is on course for implementing a single payer system by 2017. This first breakthrough in the decades-long struggle for universal health...

Citizens unequally participate in referendums and this may systematically bias policy in favor of those who vote. Some view compulsory voting as an important tool to alleviate this problem while others worry about its detrimental effects on the legitimacy and quality of democratic...

The academic literature on the prize system describes prizes as a radical alternative to intellectual property. The debate over which system is preferable has existed for centuries, and usually boils down to a single question: can the government determine the appropriate reward for innovations...

Why has environmental enforcement waned as environmental harms continue to grow bigger? This article, part of a symposium on enforcement of laws in the environmental and financial sectors, posits that a change in perceived immediacy of environmental harm, coupled with a change in communitarian...

Intellectual property scholars have vigorously debated the merits of patents versus prizes for encouraging innovation, with occasional consideration of government grants. But these are not the only options. Perhaps most significantly, the patents-versus-prizes (or...

We construct a dynamic model to study the interaction between households' investment decisions, their voting strategies, and government's choice of fiscal policy. Our purposes are threefold. First, we provide a theory of the beneficial effects of political "gridlock". Second, we characterize an...

Addressing climate change requires individual behavior change and voter support for pro-climate policies, yet surprisingly little is known about how to achieve these outcomes. In this paper, we estimate causal effects of additional education on pro-climate outcomes using new compulsory schooling...

The Mengerian-Misesian tradition in economics is also known as the causal-realist approach – in other words, it studies the causal structure of economic phenomena conceived of as outgrowths of real human actions. Thus, it finds verbal descriptions and declarations economically meaningful only...

Intellectual Property (IP) scholars increasingly are turning to the works and analytical frameworks of Elinor ("Lin") Ostrom in an effort to determine the best property/regulatory regime(s) for governing various kinds of information in different contexts. This paper serves as a general...

The Maoists claim that they are fighting for the cause of the rural poor languishing under extreme poverty and impoverish conditions – a claim also acknowledged by the expert committee of Indian Planning Commission (2008). On the other hand, the government of India dubs the Maoists revolution...