Are behavioral nudges consonant with the free society? Rizzo and Whitman argue that, with few exceptions, behavioral interventions aimed at addressing self-harms are unjustified and deleterious to freedom. At the core of their critique is a rejection of a narrow neoclassical account of...

How societies can cope with flood risk along coasts and riverbanks is a critical theoretical and empirical problem – particularly in the wake of anthropogenic climate change and the increased severity of floods. An example of this challenge is the growing costs of publicly-funded flood defense...

Mark Pennington's Robust Political Economy is a systematic exposition of a framework for analyzing institutional performance. The Robust Political Economy framework evaluates institutions according to their ability to solve knowledge and incentive problems. On grounds of robustness, Pennington...

Can John Stuart Mill’s radicalism achieve liberal egalitarian ends? Joseph Persky’s The Political Economy of Progress is a provocative and compelling discussion of Mill’s economic thought. It is also a defense of radical political economy. Providing valuable historical context, Persky...

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of rapid, informed executive decision-making in times of crisis, as well as wide variation in the capacity of states to cope with public health challenges. The crisis has also challenged liberal defenders of limited governments that are often...

Evidence-based medicine (EBM), with its evidence hierarchies and emphasis on RCTs, meta-analyses and systematic reviews, sets the model for evidence-based policy almost everywhere, policing no exception. But how closely should policing follow this model? We argue that RCTs can tell you little...

Purpose: Explore the possible contributions of blockchain technology to creating new governance structures that facilitate social cooperation.Methodology: Conceptual analysis with key ideas in new institutional economics and political theory.Findings: Blockchain technology provides a new tool...

Twenty-five years ago, Sweden enacted the most ambitious school choice policy seen in the Western world, allowing families to select any school regardless of their residence and independent providers to open new Free Schools after satisfying some general regulatory requirements. This made...

Evidence based-policy (EBP) is a popular research paradigm in the applied social sciences and within government agencies. Informally, EBP represents an explicit commitment to applying scientific methods to public affairs, in contrast to ideologically-driven or merely intuitive “common-sense”...