This paper explores the potential for empirical analysis of corruption and countervailing action, based on data extracted from newspapers. Theoretical analysis suggests that when the press is free and competitive, it is likely to cover corruption and direct forms of countervailing action...

This note argues that the competitive paradigm of neoclassical economics breaks down in the presence of constant returns to scale (CRS). With CRS, all goods can be produced at identical costs by all economic agents, making self-production a feasible alternative to market production. In the...

This paper defines a new approach to measuring global disparities in development. Instead of comparing some characteristic, X, of development between people in rich and poor countries, we propose to compare X for people in poor countries against pets (of the mammalian kind) in rich countries....

This paper reviews the growing body of evidence on the relative economic standing of different regions of the world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In general, it does not find support for Eurocentric claims regarding Western Europe's early economic lead. The Eurocentric...

The present system of tenure in American colleges – combined with a dramatic rise in the proportion of non-tenure-track faculty – has led to a near-closure of active markets for most tenured faculty. In turn, this produces two types of mismatches: some departments/colleges have faculty they...

An examination and critique of the functionalist literature on corruption in the political administration of less developed countries (LDCs) indicate that its claims are without empirical foundation. Its theses with regard to the political, economic and administrative effects in most LDCs...

It has often been argued that bribery creates auction-like conditions and, hence, improves allocative efficiency of bureaucratic decisions. This article shows that these auction-like conditions are not likely to exist because officials will restrict access to bribery in order to reduce the risks...

Starting from a simple premise, this paper has proposed a framework that is at once capable of explaining variations in levels of corruption across governments, their subunits, and over time.The simple premise is that corruption nearly always creates winners and losers who may take...

These notes suggest a methodology that may lead to an ordinal ranking of societies, economies and ethnic groups -- both in the past and present -- on the basis of their work ethos. These rankings may then be employed to test my thesis that work ethos has had an important influence on the pace of...

This paper works out some of the basic properties of an economy with energy as a factor of production. The economy now consists of streams of energy conversions that direct energy to the production of goods and services. The focus on energy generates a variety of insights. It yields a new...