Since Hayek's pioneering work in the 1930's, the Austrian business cycle theory has been presented as a disequilibrium theory populated by less-than-perfectly rational agents. In contrast, we maintain that (1) the Austrian business cycle theory is consistent with rational expectations and (2)...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the political philosophy of John C. Calhoun from the perspective of Virginia Political Economy. Specifically, this paper argues that Calhoun's theory of the concurrent majority offers a way of operationalizing the "generality norm" of Buchanan and...

This paper presents a case study of the emergence of currency from a barter economy. We use this case study to attempt to shed light on the relative importance of various types of frictions that lead to the emergence of money in search-theoretic models of currency formation. In particular, our...

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has claimed that the Fed's bank bailouts during the 2008 financial crisis were consistent with Walter Bagehot's rules for a lender of last resort. This paper demonstrates Bernanke's claims to be mistaken. First, we outline Bagehot's doctrine for a classical...

The term “marketplace of ideas” is thoroughly misleading. This phrase is often used to suggest that bad ideas are “defeated” by better ideas in public discourse. In the field of economics, for example, it is commonly assumed that the mainstream, precisely because it is the mainstream,...

I contribute to the theory of entangled political economy by showing how entanglement can be characterized in terms of political property rights. A political property right grants its holder a share of decision-making power in a specific context, as well as specifies to whom the costs and...

Politics, like any social process, involves selection mechanisms that determine whether the outcomes of the process are efficient. This paper presents a model of politics as an evolutionary process. The decisions of interest groups to enter politics determines the selected policy. Our model...

I present a theory of political property rights that serves as a complement to familiar Tiebout mechanisms in explaining governance outcomes. I argue that when the structure of political property rights is such that the polity most closely resembles a business corporation, governance will be...

Austrian economists are perhaps most well-known for developing the theory of the market process — how producers and consumers, guided by market prices, are able to coordinate their actions over time. In this paper we extend Austrian insights to the provision of fundamental governance goods. It...

In this paper, I examine the problem of space debris detritus from spacecraft launches that remains in orbit using the tools of economics. The difficulties posed by space debris resemble those typically associated with public goods and common pool resources. Thus it is not surprising that a...