What governs central bank decisions? Most considerations focus on motivations. Instead, we consider the extent to which specific behaviors have adaptive value in the context of central banking. From this perspective, poor decisions are not the product of poor motivations. They are, instead, a...

Most liberal constitutional theorizing, as exemplified by Buchanan (1975) and Rawls (1971), Operates with a two-level scheme of analysis. The first level entails agreement on the rules through which a polity is constituted; the second level entails self-interested action inside that framework of...

What determines the kinds of questions economists ask and the answers they find convincing? More generally, why are the institutions that constitute scholarly economics the way they are? I answer both of these questions by positing that within the modern economics profession, it is plausible...

Constitutional political economy mostly distinguishes between rules and actions, with rules selected prior to actions within those rules. While we accept the coherence of this distinction, we pursue it within an open rather than closed scheme of analysis. Doing this entails recognition that...

We provide an initial assessment of the Federal Reserve's policy response to the COVID-19 contraction. We briefly review the historical episode and consider the standard textbook treatment of a pandemic on the macroeconomy. We summarize and then evaluate the Fed's monetary and emergency lending...

I explore how political property rights to revenues from governance relate to generality norms in governance. I do so by examining the rise of Western constitutional liberalism from the perspective of property rights economics and political economy. While it is true that Western political...

This paper applies the logic of economic calculation to the actions of autocrats. We model autocrats as stationary bandits who use profit and loss calculations to select institutions that maximize their extraction rents. We find in many cases autocrats achieve rent maximization through creating...

Tullock (2005, p. 160) notes that the perceived robust relationship between democracy and economic progress is due mostly to assumption, rather than analysis. Taking up Tullock's challenge to consider the relationship between economic progress and other political forms, we re-assess the...

This paper presents a case study of the emergence of currency from a barter economy, a process discussed theoretically by Menger (1892). In particular, we use this case study to attempt to adjudicate between chartalist and emergent theories of currency formation. Using the records of an online...

This paper develops the theory of entangled political economy by outlining a process by which the political-economic order can become increasingly entangled. The theory posits that a Big Player polity organization, a key feature of which is a lack of a hard budget constraint, exports this...