The Austrian School of Economics: A view from London

The Review of Austrian Economics - This paper explores the intellectual context of the Department of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) during the 1930s. We...     

Economics of externalities and public policy

In this paper we study a particular case of “multiple” externalities associated to the production of a good/activity, whose external effects can change from positive to negative depending on the level of output (intersecting externalities). To analyze their impact on the public policy we propose a very simple two-agent partial equilibrium model in the technological context of externalities. In a static framework, the centralized solution always implies an optimal policy, which may consist of taxation or subsidization depending on the individual optimum and on the technology parameters. In a dynamic model with local knowledge of the efficiency function and instantaneous output adjustments, such an optimal policy can be structurally stable or unstable. In the latter case, under small changes of the parameters the policy may switch from low taxation/subsidization to high taxation/subsidization or vice versa, or even jump discontinuously from taxation to subsidization or vice versa. Furthermore, the decentralized solution based upon “tradable rights” can be economically equivalent to the centralized solution in the form of taxation policy but the two solutions may be not politically equivalent.

A social morality for mortals: A review essay of <Emphasis Type="Italic">the order of public reason: A theory of freedom and morality in a diverse and bounded world</Emphasis>

This essay praises Gerald Gaus’s The Order of Public Reason as a building block for all normative explorations into the institutional foundations of human sociability. It evaluates the normative implications put forth by Gaus in terms of the Kirzner’s “finder’s keeper’s ethic.” This raises a question about the relationship between the moral order and the political order that underlies market processes. Examining the role of entrepreneurship in the market process in relation to Kirzner’s “finder’s keeper’s principle” suggests a deeper ethical foundation that underpins the institutional conditions of “social morality.”     

Hayek,Leoni, and Law as the Fifth Factor of Production

This paper discusses the nature of law as the fifth factor of production, or more fundamentally as the institutional framework within which the production process takes place. Unlike land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship, whose coordination is an outcome of institutional arrangements, the law itself is the institutional embodiment of the voluntary exchange processes evolving from the decisions, but not the design, of judges that form the reliable expectations about who “plans” the coordination of the other four factors of production. The legal theory of Hayek and Leoni lends itself to this dual nature of spontaneous order analysis and also the basis of the burgeoning literature on analytical anarchism. Although Hayek and Leoni were not legal centralists, their conception of law as part of a larger spontaneous order was open-ended to competition and experimentation on the constitutional level of rules just as that experienced on the post-constitutional level of the market itself.     

The Division of Labor and Knowledge is Limited by the Division of Ownership Over the Ultimate Resource: The Role of Economies of Scope in Julian Simon

The Review of Austrian Economics - Julian Simon famously argued that economic growth is correlated with population growth. The basis for this correlation is what Simon refers to as the...     

Adaptation of the Attitude Behavioural Scale section of a PATT instrument for the Omani context

International Journal of Technology and Design Education - This study is about the adaptation of the Attitude Behavioural Scale (ABS) section of a Pupils’ Attitudes Towards Technology (PATT)...     

The Lighthouse Debate and the Dynamics of Interventionism

The Review of Austrian Economics - Coase’s publication of “The Lighthouse in Economics” (1974) sparked a polarizing debate over his claim that government intervention is not...     

Investment in Tourism Market: A Dynamic Model of Differentiated Oligopoly

We present a theoretical dynamic model in tourism economics, assuming that the market for tourism is an oligopoly with differentiated products. Destinations can invest in order to improve their stock of physical, natural or cultural resources. Tourism flows yield current revenues, but they are usually detrimental for the stock of resources. We find the solution of the dynamic model, and in particular we find the open-loop Nash equilibrium of the game among destinations, under alternative settings, depending on whether the degree of differentiation among destinations is exogenous or endogenous. In particular, under the latter case, an increase of the number of destinations leads to a higher degree of product differentiation in steady state.