Buchanan and public finance: The tennessee years

James Buchanan’s views on public finance have already been analyzed and they are quite well known, as are their origins and roots. However, nothing has ever been said about why Buchanan chose public finance in the first place. The first goal of this paper is to show that Buchanan had made this choice before arriving at Chicago. We show how Carlton C. Sims and Charles P. White influenced him. We also show, by analyzing Buchanan’s M.A. thesis, that he was not only interested in public finance but was also primarily concerned by ethical questions and defended a bureaucratic centralized solution to solve the problem he was discussing – how to share the benefits collected from a gasoline tax among Counties. This helps to understand that Buchanan did not choose to study public finance to learn how to fight government intervention. Quite the contrary: it was to legitimate it. Second, we also demonstrate that a lot of the ideas that will matter for Buchanan in his career – the importance of ethics and the principle of an equal treatment for equals, the need to link taxes to benefits, the importance to adapt the scale of provision of a public good to the type of public good – were already present in this first work.

     

Federalism and Conflicts over Principalship. Some Insights into the American Constitutional History

The article provides an economic interpretation of Kelsen's theory of decentralized governments. It helps to distinguish different forms of federalism and in particular the corresponding conflicts of principalship inside the governmental structure. The model is applied to the early American constitutional history and shows how opposed views of agency relationships in the constitution foreshadowed what would later end up in a civil war.     

Efficient Sorting in a Dynamic Adverse-Selection Model

We discuss a class of markets for durable goods where efficiency (or approximate efficiency) is obtained despite the presence of information asymmetries. In the model, the number of times a good has changed hands (the vintage of the good) is an accurate signal of its quality, each consumer self-selects into obtaining the vintage that the social planner would have assigned to her, and consumers' equilibrium trading behaviour in secondary markets is not subject to adverse selection. We show that producers have the incentive to choose contracts that lead to the efficient allocation, and to supply the efficient output. We also provide a contrast between leasing contracts, resale contracts, and different kinds of rental contracts. Resale contracts do not lead to the efficient allocation. A specific kind of rental contract provides the appropriate incentives to consumers.     

Economists on Darwin's theory of social evolution and human behaviour

Abstract

This article analyses Darwin's image among economists with a specific focus on his theory of social evolution as presented in the Descent of Man (1871). We propose an analysis of the way and context in which economists refer to Darwin, mention his name and quote his writings. It then appears that Darwin is most of the time viewed as a biologist only, who never developed his own theory of social evolution. He is thus quoted as a biologist who either borrowed concepts from economists who developed a theory of social evolution, or laid the basis for biological theory of social evolution developed by others, Spencer, in particular. It is only recently that eventually the twofold dimensions—biological and social—of Darwin's general theory of evolution are considered together by bioeconomists.     

The social cost problem,rights, and the (non)empty core

We revisit the “Coase theorem” through the lens of a cooperative game model which takes into account the assignment of rights among agents involved in a problem of social cost. We consider the case where one polluter interacts with many potential victims. Given an assignment or a mapping of rights, we represent a social cost problem by a cooperative game. A solution consists in a payoff vector. We introduce three properties for a mapping of rights. First, core compatibility indicates that the core of the associated cooperative games is nonempty. Second, Kaldor‐Hicks core compatibility indicates that there is a payoff vector in the core where victims are fully compensated for the damage once the negotiations are completed. Third, no veto power for a victim says that no victim has the power to veto an agreement signed by the rest of the society. We then demonstrate two main results. First, core compatibility is satisfied if and only if the rights are assigned either to the polluter or to the entire set of victims. Second, there is no mapping of rights satisfying Kaldor‐Hicks core compatibility and no veto power for a victim.     

How far an Austrian law and economics should be Posnerian?

The purpose of this note is to stress that Posner??s conception of law and of the role of judges in a legal system might be problematic for an Austrian approach to law and economics, despite the praxeological dimension of his analysis.     

Value and exchange in law and economics: Buchanan versus posner

Meir Kohn’s Exchange and Value claims that economics can be organised around two opposed paradigms, the exchange and the value paradigms. In this paper, we apply this dichotomy to characterize the analyses proposed by economists in the field known as “law and economics”. We compare and contrasts the perspectives proposed by two prominent scholars—James Buchanan and Richard Posner—and argue that they, respectively, represent the exchange and the value paradigm in law and economics. More precisely, we show that Buchanan sticks to a definition of economics based on the exchange paradigm, and this leads him to define law and economics in a rather specific, different, narrower than Posner’s way to define law and economics—a definition that corresponds to a conception of economics based on the value paradigm.     

Buchanan’s constitutional political economy: exchange vs. choice in economics and in politics

This article discusses the methodological foundations of Buchanan’s constitutional political economy. We argue that Buchanan is a constitutional economist because he is an economist or a political economist. In other words, Buchanan is a constitutional economist—he insists on the necessity of focusing on constitutions and to analyze the “rules of the social game”—because he defines economics as a science of exchange. Buchanan’s definition of economics is not only specific, it is also opposed to the definition of economics that other economists retain and, above all, opposed to the definition of economics that many public choice theorists use. The latter have, in effect, adopted the Robbins 1932 definition of economics as a science of choice that Buchanan criticizes and rejects. Buchanan’s constitutional economics can be a branch of public choice only under certain conditions.