In George Stigler’s (1971) economic theory of regulation, the primary motive of regulatory intervention is the promotion of private interests. More recently, Andrei Shleifer (2010, 2012) has proposed an alternative to Stigler’s theory. Shleifer’s new theory of regulation holds that the rise of regulatory institutions over the course of the 20th century is in fact efficient and providing the requisite social control of business. Contrary to Shleifer, we argue here the comparative efficiency of an institutional solution depends more on its institutional features (centralized/decentralized, contested/uncontested) than its form (regulation, courts, or private orderings).

This paper assesses the short-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on the market for childcare and speculates about potential long-term consequences of pandemic-related policy intervention.

We argue that the intensification of religious behavioral standards surrounding alcohol in the Utah territory was a direct result of the quickly encroaching Transcontinental Railroad, the advancing federal government of the United States after the end of the civil war, statehood, the threat of being integrated into the larger market economy that came with both, and ultimately federal alcohol prohibition. The stricter behavioral standards for practicing Mormons allowed the church to continue to provide a wide array of public goods in the face of increased potential for trade with religious outsiders in and outside of the Beehive (Utah territory).

An obvious alternative to formal enforcement of contracts and property rights is enforcement through private security, protection, and courts (Besley 1995). Historic episodes of such private mechanisms for the enforcement of rules, rights, and regulations abound and private enforcement mechanisms are becoming increasingly important in developed countries today as public police are underfunded and often unreliable (Benson, Rasmussen, and Kim 1998). We contribute to the literature on private enforcement mechanisms by providing an example of a private protection institution that exists in the developing world today.

We review the assumptions of two of the original contributions to the science of science literature regarding human agents and compare them to the assumptions underlying economic models. We assert that Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn did for the science of science literature what Buchanan and Tullock (1962) did for politics in the 1950s, which is to reassert behavioral symmetry. We then extend some of Buchanan’s insights from his study of politics and constitutions, public choice and constitutional political economy, to the study of science and draw out implications for interest-group influence in the republic of science.

In this paper, we discuss how the legacy of Denzau and North (1994) should be applied to current and future economic inquiries and, in particular, how it might inform work in development economics, behavioral economics, and in the study of the effects of social norms on economic outcomes. We argue that a perspective that emphasizes the role of the economic actor as entrepreneur in the context of shared mental models and institutions can improve economic analysis in those areas of research, which currently focus on the economist as exogenous policy expert.