Economic freedom is often defined as a negative liberty – freedom from interference. This contrasts with positive liberty which is defined as freedom to do which refers to capacities. A well-established literature argues that income inequality reduces positive liberty by limiting the...

Lighthouses are the quintessential public goods and thus constitute a key illustration of market failure in need of government remedy. Considerable debates have been waged over whether optimal private provision was historically possible. However, little to no attention has been devoted to how...

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the wheat oriented agrarian economy of Lower Canada (the French-speaking modern-day province of Quebec) saw a rapid collapse in wheat production dubbed the “wheat crisis.” In a single decade, Quebec went from being an exporter of wheat to an...

Should procedural barriers to constitutional amendment be more onerous than those to the policy changes of ordinary politics? – i.e., should constitutions be entrenched? One criterion by which to evaluate these questions is economic performance. Using data on countries worldwide and...

What is self-governance, and under what sets of institutions is it possible? We explore this question from the perspective of informal (de facto) constitutionalism. The dominant approach, grounded in formal constitutionalism, overlooks crucial institutional features that determine whether...

A growing literature seeks to identify the determinants of economic freedom. Within that literature, very few studies have focused on constitutional design. We study the entrenchment of constitutional provisions, i.e., the extent to which they are more difficult (costly) to change than...

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,...