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Gordon Tullock's "Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopolies, and Theft" is by now widely regarded to be a classic work in public choice. However, like many "classic papers," it was not always so highly regarded. It was rejected at several journals before finding its way to print and arguably took two or three decades to be fully appreciated. This paper discusses developments in the public choice and rent seeking literatures that helped bring Tullock's paper to its status as a classic work in political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We recommend that an auction market replace the current system for submitting academic papers and show a strict Pareto-improvement in equilibrium. Besides the benefit of speed, this mechanism increases the average quality of articles and journals and rewards editors and referees for their effort. The 'academic dollar' proceeds from papers sold at auction go to authors, editors and referees of cited articles. This nonpecuniary income indicates the academic impact of an article-facilitating decisions on tenure and promotion. This auction market does not require more work of editors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on a paper that analyzes the strategic problem of a political leader in building a reputation of being willing to punish the transgressions of followers even when it may be costly to do so. Description of an effective legislative leader based on the model developed in the paper; Way by which a leader can make his threat to punish credible; Rationalization of the existence of a legislative leader.

The article focuses on the specification of models of campaign finance and comments on papers which address the specific issues related to specification problems within a general model of Congressional voting in the U.S. The appropriate model within which to address the issues concerning the said papers is one which deals with the relationship between the voting behavior of Congressional representatives, the voting behavior of the constituents and the contributions of donors to campaigns.

Comments on Albert Breton and Thomas Courchene's papers on the constitutional change in Canada. Important questions to ask about constitutional arrangements and about their design and redesign; View of Breton on the codification of a Charter of Rights in the 1982 Constitution; Inconsistencies in Courchene's theory.

Comments on the papers by Theodore Keeler and Barry Weingast about the changes in the U.S. regulatory process. Highlights of Keeler's paper; Information on Weingast's paper; Factor that drives the voter and interest groups to support new views through the electoral process.

This paper draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Friedrich Hayek to understand threats to personal and enterprise freedom, arising from public health governance. Whereas public choice theory examines the incentives these institutions provide to agents, the analysis here understands those incentives as framed by discursive social constructions that affect the identity, power, and positionality of different actors. It shows how overlapping discourses of scientific rationalism may generate a 'road to serfdom' narrowing freedom of action and expression across an expanding terrain. As such, the paper contributes to the growing literature emphasising the importance of narratives, stories and metaphors as shaping political economic action in ways feeding through to outcomes and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on a paper that applied some technical analysis from game theory to a dynamic version of the divide-the-dollar game in voting theory. Contribution of the work in principle to the understanding of the role of voting as a paradigmatic political institution; Analysis of whether the approach can yield a testable theory of the outcomes of majority rule; Investigation of how outcomes change over time as an existing government operates in a changing environment.

Comments on a paper about the relevant lessons from the U.S. Federal Convention of 1787 in the context of the role of institutions in political economy and the performance of economies. Reasons for studying institutions; Path of historical change in terms of the way in which institutions evolved through time; Similarity of the sequential pattern of institutional evolution with the way in which the evolution of common law is perceived.

Comments on an article written by Ronald Findlay and Stanislaw Wellisz regarding trade policy. Approach of the authors to voluntary export restraint; Sociological characteristics of the economics profession according to the article; Views of economists on free trade; Explanation on tariff determination.

Presents a list of papers presented at the 1977 annual meetings of the Public Choice Society held at Braniff Place in New Orleans, Louisiana from March 11 to 13, 2005.

Perhaps the most important element of James Buchanan's contribution to constitutional economics is his differentiation between pre- and post-constitutional levels of decision-making. At first glance, a tension may appear between those two levels of analysis. In one, the rules by which we live are up for debate, allowing us to exercise our creative and imaginative capabilities in constitutional construction. In the other, the rules are viewed as fixed, and we are left simply to treat them as constraints. This paper explores three key elements of Buchanan's thought that allow him to navigate successfully between the two levels. The first is the importance of "the relatively absolute absolute", a concept learned from his mentor, Frank Knight. The second is Buchanan's approach to "truth judgments" in politics, and their status in our political discussions. Third, we draw on Buchanan's insights in his 1959 paper "Positive Economics, Welfare Economics, and Political Economy" to show how political economists should participate in this decision-making process—not as expert philosopher-kings, but as co-equals with their fellow citizens. Finally, we illustrate Buchanan's system of thought in action by presenting two case studies: Virginia education policy in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, and the 1928 Supreme Court ruling in Miller v. Schoene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its publication in 1971, George J. Stigler's "Theory of Economic Regulation" (1971), secured its place as the dominant theory of the causes and consequences of regulation in economics. The article was cited by the economic Nobel prize committee as one of the reasons Stigler received the prize in 1982. In his article, Stigler (1971) frames the conversation regarding the "Theory of Economic Regulation" around an analysis of the political demand for and supply of regulation. Following the 50th anniversary of the 1971 paper, the contributors to this special issue evaluate the impact of his "Theory of Economic Regulation", apply it to other policy questions, and summarize the literature produced in response to his original insight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on Tom Courchene's informative analysis of the central role played by the Canadian Economic Union issue in the constitutional debates of 1982. Discussion of balkanization; First order of business for any producer seeking rents via the political process; Dominant feature in the Canadian political system.

This special issue brings together the papers presented and discussed at the James M. Buchanan Centennial Birthday Academic Conference hosted at Middle Tennessee State University. The papers appraise and extend Buchanan's contributions to the fields of public choice and constitutional political economy. This special issue demonstrates that Buchanan's scholarship continues to be relevant and fruitful for scholars working on modern scholarship in these fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue brings together the papers presented and discussed at the Harold A. Black Academic Conference hosted by the Probasco Distinguished Chair of Free Enterprise at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, the Haslam College of Business at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the Political Economy Research Institute at Middle Tennessee State University. Dr. Black is an emeritus professor of finance at the Haslam College of Business at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and has had a distinguished career advancing our understanding of race and discrimination in banking and finance. More specifically, throughout his career, Dr. Black undertook in-depth empirical studies that examined the institutional details of statistically observed disparate outcomes in banking and finance to determine whether these outcomes were attributable to discrimination or could be explained by non-discriminatory factors. In some instances, Dr. Black found that addressing disparate outcomes with inappropriate policies could result in perverse consequences that harmed the intended beneficiaries. This introduction explores the relationship between Harold Black's work, the papers in this special issue examining, building on, and extending Harold Black's work, and public choice economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite Gordon Tullock's famous effort to motivate researchers to quantify investments in rent seeking, the empirical measurement of rent-seeking activity remains under-studied. This paper proposes a new estimate of rent seeking by comparing the industrial composition of MSAs that contain a state capital with those of a comparable synthetic match. Each of these synthetic matches are constructed as a weighted average of all MSAs that do not contain a state capital, where the weights are chosen via entropy balancing. This paper offers the first panel estimate of rent seeking in the United States by state and year for the years 2004–2020. We also provide the first industry-specific measures of rent seeking, in addition to aggregate indexes of traditional, in-kind, indirect, and total rent seeking. All measures of rent seeking described in this paper have been made publicly available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dr. Harold Black has made a career of investigating the effects of different rules and institutional arrangements on the extent to which market participants in finance can exercise a taste for discrimination. This paper considers the nature of Black's contributions, and reviews some particulars of his voluminous published research, focusing especially on his work on the number of "overages" charged by banks, and the differences in the effects of the race of bank owners, as explained by the race of customers. The paper concludes by connecting Dr. Black's work to his "origin story," which helps explain his consistent focus on careful empirical distinctions rather than preconceptions and biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the articles of David Austen-Smith and Kenneth A. Shepsle regarding legislative institutions. Problems raised on the interactions between elections and legislatures; Approach used by Austen-Smith on the relationship between electoral and legislative theories; Discussion of the institutional social-choice paradigm; Views on the legislative model of Shepsle.

The article presents views and insights of the author concerning the election law and charter-change processes in the U.S. The author presented his most useful contributions to the problems of modeling constitutional choice processes. He points out that the battles in constitutional conventions are often between the reformers bend on change and the politicians who want to block or shape change to serve their quite different objectives.

An editorial is presented which addresses the life of the late European public-choice scholar Heinrich W. Ursprung, and it mentions his Swiss upbringing and his former role as the president of the European Public Choice Society. Political competition and policy modeling in a democracy are examined, along with politicians, environmentalists, and political discretion. Collaborative relationships and independence are also assessed.

A lack of information about electoral candidates leads to a ballot order effect that increases the chances of candidates in the top electoral list positions winning voters' support. The ballot order effect is confounded by the effect of ranking and the effect of attention, which work in the same direction. We exploit a variation in ballot layout (the quasi-random location of the break between the first and second sides of the ballot) in the 2006, 2010, 2013, and 2017 Czech parliamentary open list proportional representation elections to disentangle these effects and identify the effect of attention. We show that being listed on the reverse side of the ballot paper decreases electoral support—measured by number of preferential votes received—by at least 40%. Focusing on preferential votes allows us to filter out the effect of political party preference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monetary policy and institutions are far from exempt from political influences. In this paper, we analyze monetary institutions not as being run by either benevolent technocrats or a wealth-maximizing Leviathan, but as the outcome of competition between interest groups trying to capture wealth transfers. We argue that while interest groups gaining from specific monetary policies and institutions can easily identify themselves, losers often cannot. As a result, losers have a more difficult time fighting back, and both the organization of money production and monetary policy are shaped by political competition between rent-seekers. We use our framework to analyze modern developments in monetary policies and institutions, namely (1) the Fed's reaction to the 2007 financial crisis, (2) the Fed's reaction to the COVID crisis, and (3) the establishment and development of the euro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous cities around the world have tried to internalize externality costs from road traffic by instituting charges for entering their city centers. The revenues collected from these charges are often redistributed to improve conditions for motorists, cyclists, pedestrians, and public transport. At the same time, many schemes allow for exemption of cleaner vehicles, which potentially reduces revenue collection. This paper assesses the effect of exempting electric vehicles from urban toll ring charges on the charge that is levied on conventional car drivers. Using panel data of Norwegian cities that have urban toll rings, I exploit regional variation in electric car adaption and find that owners of conventional cars pay 3.3 NOK (0.36 USD) more per passage due to the exemption. Moreover, I find that local governments that are fragmented or have a left-wing majority increase toll charges more due to the loss in revenue. As the majority of electric vehicle owners have above-average incomes, the exemption implies a distributional effect in which low-income groups pay the largest portion of the increased toll price. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a framework for understanding optimal lockdowns and makes three contributions. First, it theoretically analyzes lockdown policies and argues that policy makers systematically enact too strict lockdowns because their incentives are misaligned with achieving desired ends and they cannot adapt to changing circumstances. Second, it provides a benchmark to determine how strongly policy makers in different locations should respond to COVID-19. Finally, it provides a framework for understanding how, when, and why lockdown policy is expected to change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an attempt to contribute to the literature on how and why confidence in market participants and in the government shape the demand for market regulation, this paper contrasts two interpretations. The interpretation implicit in the empirical literature supposes that people trade off market failures for government failures. The paper argues that implicit in the broader public choice literature there is an alternative that emphasizes the nirvana fallacy and leads to the conclusion that people's views on markets and government in general is a determinant of the effect of trust on the demand for regulation. The paper applies a meta-regression analysis to examine the results of country-level regressions with different survey waves of the Integrated Values Surveys. It shows that the effect of the two kinds of trust are asymmetric and that the negative effect of the confidence in companies on the demand for government regulation is larger in countries that score higher on individualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates Gordon Tullock's unpublished manuscripts that proposed a public choice interpretation of American slavery. Drafted in response to Conrad and Meyer's seminal 1958 article on the economics of slavery, Tullock's writings influenced the early debate over slavery through his University of Virginia colleague John E. Moes. This paper uses Tullock's surviving writings to map out his theory of slavery and situate it in the broader economic analysis of the institution and identify the links between the economics of slavery and the public choice research tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent empirical literature studied the correlation between fiscal disparities and corruption, assuming that corruption is responsible for variations in tax bases (incomes), but few studies test whether local fiscal disparities may be responsible for variations in the level of corruption. Through a laboratory experiment, this paper aims to investigate the effect of fiscal disparities on local administrators' corruption detection by local voters, and the effect of simple or complex equalization formulas on corruption detection. We provide clear experimental evidence of an inverse correlation between fiscal disparity and corruption detection, and a positive effect of fiscal equalization on citizens' ability to detect corruption, the last depending on the equalization formula adopted. We demonstrate that equalization may be useful to improve the process by which subnational voters evaluate potentially corrupt governments and that the simple equalization formula, namely revenue equalization, is more effective than the complex one, namely full equalization of fiscal capacities and costs of provision of local public goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we compare deterrence, settlement, and litigation spending under adversarial and inquisitorial systems. We present a basic litigation model with three sequential stages—care, settlement, litigation—and we test the predictions on experimental data. In line with our theoretical expectations, we find that, compared with the adversarial system, the inquisitorial system is associated with lower litigation spending, lower rates of cases settled, and tends to strengthen deterrence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]