Public Choice

DICTATORSHIP Part 2 (Public Choice)

2. Growth and Economic Efficiency Under Dictatorship There has been a lot of research asking the question, which is better for the economy, democracy or dictatorship? The answer is complex, mainly because the economic systems under autocracies vary so much. Those who believe there is some simple formula for distinguishing the economy of dictatorship from […]

ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS (Public Choice)

Building on the seminal contributions by Pigou (1920), Coase (1960) and Baumol and Oates (1971), economists have extensively explored the role that economic incentives might play in bringing a more efficient allocation of natural resources. The theory of environmental economics suggests that pricing instruments are an adequate means to internalize external costs. More specifically, there […]

EXPERIMENTAL PUBLIC CHOICE

1. Introduction A few decades ago, most economists believed that their discipline was non-experimental. Economic phenomena should be studied theoretically or empirically. The ideal paper was one where rigorous theory was tested using advanced econometric methods. The fact that the empirics were usually based on (often incomplete) field data only remotely related to the problem […]

GORDON TULLOCK AT FOUR SCORE YEARS: AN EVALUATION Part 1 (Public Choice)

1. Biographical Details Gordon Tullock was born in Rockford, Illinois on February 16, 1922, four score years ago. His father, George was a hardy Midwesterner of Scottish ancestry, his mother, Helen, was of equally hardy Pennsylvania Dutch stock. He obtained his basic education in the public schools of that city, displaying from early childhood a […]

GORDON TULLOCK AT FOUR SCORE YEARS: AN EVALUATION Part 2 (Public Choice)

5. The Vote Motive The truly original insights into the vote motive must be ascribed to Duncan Black, whose writings during the late 1940s on the median vote theorem and the problem of vote cycles make him the undisputed Founding Father of public choice, and to Anthony Downs, whose 1957 book introduced rational choice analysis […]

INTEREST GROUP BEHAVIOR AND INFLUENCE (Public Choice)

1. Introduction During the last two decades economics has witnessed a remarkable upsurge in theoretical as well as empirical studies of the behavior and political influence of interest groups. Recent books by Sloof (1998), Drazen (2000), Persson and Tabellini (2000), and Grossman and Helpman (2001) refer to a wealth of evidence of the significance of […]

INTERNATIONAL TRADE POLICY: DEPARTURE FROM FREE TRADE (Public Choice)

In a world with no international boundaries and no sovereign governments, all trade would be domestic and there could be no international trade policy. Governments and national sovereignty introduce international trade, but the gains from free trade (Kemp, 1962; Samuelson, 1962) remain unaffected. Yet nonetheless governments have often chosen to depart from free trade. Economic […]

JAMES M. BUCHANAN (Public Choice)

1. Introduction James M. Buchanan was born on October 3, 1919, in Murfeesboro, Tennessee. He grew up on a farm in this area of the United States. His post-secondary school education consists of a B.A. degree from Middle Tennessee State University (1940), an M.A. degree in economics from the University of Tennessee (1941), and a […]

MILTON FRIEDMAN, 1912: HARBINGER OF THE PUBLIC CHOICE REVOLUTION Part 1

1. Introduction Throughout the first fifteen years following the end of World War II the economics profession throughout the Western World was characterized by a touching belief in the omniscience and impartiality of government as the servant of the public good and by a cynical belief in the endemic failure of free markets to maximize […]

MILTON FRIEDMAN, 1912: HARBINGER OF THE PUBLIC CHOICE REVOLUTION Part 2

3.3. Money Matters Friedman’s interest in the role of money in the macro-economy was first sparked in 1948 when Arthur Burns at the NBER asked him to research the role of money in the business cycle. Thus began a thirty-year program of research with Anna Schwartz that would demonstrate that money matters — indeed that […]

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