For over a century English husbands sold their wives at public auctions. We argue that wife sales were indirect Coasean divorce bargains that permitted wives to buy the right to exit marriage from their husbands in a legal environment that denied them the property rights required to buy that...

This paper investigates government takings’ effect on entrepreneurship and the market process. We find that takings redirect the market process along new paths, generating “hidden” costs in the form of foregone entrepreneurial opportunities. Because standard cost-benefit calculations of...

An important question for any researcher who wishes to revisit the socialist calculation debate is: Why beat a dead horse? With the collapse of the communism in 1991, other than for historical purposes, there seems to be little value in rehashing the debate over socialism’s feasibility....