According to the neoclassical economic theory, common goods would be underproduced by the market in the absence of a monopoly of force capable of coercing every able member of society to contribute to their provision. By applying both the methodological tools developed by the Austrian School of...

According to neoclassical economic theory, club goods would be underproduced by the market in the absence of a monopoly of force capable of coercing every able member of society to contribute to their provision. By applying both the methodological tools developed by the Austrian School of...

Scientific disciplines, like economies, can and do experience booms and busts. We document a boom in climate science which is sustained by massive levels of funding by government entities and whose scientific direction is set by an extra-scientific organization, the IPCC. Although the popular...

This study examines how quality of political institutions affects the distribution of government budget in Iran. We first introduce a mechanism through which this can shift government expenditure from patronage to more constructive public spending. Using impulse response functions (IRF) and...

In this paper, I attempt to provide a comprehensive demonstration that, contrary to popular opinion, there is nothing inherent in defense that makes it belong to the category of common goods, thus indicating that its effective provision does not require the existence of a territorial monopoly of...

How to import modern Western Institutions to suppress economic growth in underdeveloped countries? Russian experience and some warnings for newcoming reformers The monograph "Institutional Constraints on Modern Economic Growth" deals with the most dangerous obstacles standing in the way of long...

Emerging technologies, such as AI systems, distributed ledgers, but also private e-commerce and telecommunication platforms have permeated every aspect of our social, economic, political relations. Various bodies of the state, from education, via law enforcement to healthcare also increasingly...

We present a new measure for the political position of news outlets based on politicians' selective sharing of news items. Politicians predominantly share news items that are in line with their political position, hence, one can infer the political position of news outlets from the politicians'...

In law as well as economics, the most well-known aspect of Coase's “The Problem of Social Cost,” is the Coase Theorem. Over the decades, that particular notion has morphed into a crucial component of Chicago law and economics — namely, transaction cost analysis. In this Article, I...

This paper investigates whether the religious identity of state legislators in India influences development outcomes, both for citizens of their religious group and for the population as a whole. To control for politician identity to be correlated with constituency level voter preferences or...