Misjudging the character of the welfare state: Hayek,generality, and the knowledge problem

What are the limits of collective action? As James Buchanan famously worried, is it possible to empower the productive state without lapsing into the predatory state? This paper uses insights from F.A. Hayek to address problems of public goods and the role of the state. Hayek convincingly argued that no central planner has sufficient knowledge to run an economy. Yet Hayek also allowed for state provision of some goods beyond the prevention of coercion. The question, then, is whether Hayek’s safeguards offer a satisfactory response to Buchanan’s worry. This paper contends that Hayek violated his own conditions for permissible government activity. Nevertheless, he offers a serious research agenda for limiting state abuses.     

Intertemporal capital substitution and Hayekian booms

Hayek’s business cycle theory portrays monetary expansion and monetary contraction with counterintuitive asymmetry. On the one hand, it suggests that they both change relative prices and cause costly reallocations of production factors. At the same time, the theory predicts that while a monetary contraction causes the economic crisis, the monetary expansion comes with the boom. I argue that what I call intertemporal capital substitution in industries close to final consumption explains why there is a boom in spite of the costly reallocations. More specifically, monetary expansion only gradually increases the demand for nonspecific factors of production by industries that are temporally remote from final consumption. Responding to the expected higher cost of nonspecific factors, consumer-goods industries temporarily increase output and depreciate specific durable production factors faster than they planned.     

On <Emphasis Type="Italic">Private Governance</Emphasis>

Edward Peter Stringham’s book Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life (2015) is a compelling defense of the proposition that private governance is more widely used and more effective than most people think. Stringham looks to history to see how people solved problems of fraud and cheating without government intervention and provides example after compelling example to contradict the strong claim that a government or any third-party enforcer is necessary for voluntary exchange. While Stringham doesn’t take on the tough problem that private governance is not sufficient for its task, his book is intended to be the beginning, not the end, of thinking about private governance.     

Mill’s radical end of laissez-faire: A review essay of the political economy of progress: John Stuart Mill and modern radicalism

Can John Stuart Mill’s radicalism achieve liberal egalitarian ends? Joseph Persky’s The Political Economy of Progress is a provocative and compelling discussion of Mill’s economic thought. It is also a defense of radical political economy. Providing valuable historical context, Persky traces Mill’s intellectual journey as an outspoken proponent of laissez-faire to a cautious supporter of co-operative socialism. I propose two problems with Persky’s optimistic take on radical social reform. First, demands for substantive equality have led past radicals to endorse exclusionary nationalist and eugenics policies. It pushes some contemporary radicals towards illiberal interventions into intimate social life. Second, the radical critique of capitalism relies on an account of profit that neglects the epistemic function of private-property markets. Once this is acknowledged, capitalism retains some progressive credentials against radical alternatives.     

“Why historians have failed to recognize Mises’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Theory and History</Emphasis>”

Theory and History is often said to be Ludwig von Mises’ least read and least appreciated book. This article argues that historians in the Anglo-American world generally did not understand the German and Austrian traditions that Mises drew on, and that their early reviews of the book therefore fundamentally misunderstood its purpose. Most saw it as a political tract. Some commented on Mises’ contribution to the debate about the autonomy of the discipline of history. Few, however, understood Mises’ apriorism or logical approach. To understand why Theory and History has not been recognized for its a contribution to historical methodology, we must first understand Mises’ place as an outsider in the debates on historiography in the 1950s.     

A research agenda for disaster entrepreneurship

This paper addresses questions raised by Storr, Haeffele-Balch and Grube in their book Community Revival in the Wake of Disaster: Lessons in Local Entrepreneurship (2015). I review the reasons why the book is timely, especially the rising number and costs of disasters globally and the shifting norms on the role of government in disaster management. Social capital serves as a critical engine for resilience to crisis, and I move to demonstrate its importance in the mitigation and recovery stages. Then, I raise a research agenda based on their writings, focusing on building quantitative evidence to match the qualitative data already gathered by the authors. Specifically, I focus on testing claims about the definition and density of entrepreneurs, the role of polycentricity, and the public policy pools that would build entrepreneurial talent in vulnerable communities.     

The classical roots of the Austrian theory of capital and entrepreneurship

The paper deals with the continuities and discontinuities between some classical, Austrian and neo-Austrian authors with regard first to the theory of capital and then to the theory of entrepreneurship. Part I focuses on the elements of continuity between the classical and the Austrian theory of capital. These elements have been singled out by dealing first with the distinction between individual and national capital; and then with the difference between the resulting circulating-fixed capital and free-invested capital distinctions in the light, first, of the concept of roundaboutness and, then, of the method of vertical integration. Part II focuses on the elements of continuity between the Austrian theory of individual behaviour and the classical theory of national wealth. The distinctions between logical and historical time and between economics of time and economics in time are used to assess the links between the theory of capital as developed by the classics and Böhm-Bawerk, on the one hand, and the theory of entrepreneurship as developed by the neo-Austrians, on the other.     

Does a one-size-fits-all approach to financial regulations alleviate default risk? The case of dual banking systems

Financial regulations are developed to curb financial and economic fragility costs without undermining the economic contributions of banks to economic development. To understand the impact financial regulations have on reducing the financial fragility of banks we use the probability-of-default of banks as a proxy for bank failure. After analyzing data collected from 15 countries with a dual banking system for the period 2000–2015, we find convincing evidence that not all financial regulations have risk-reducing benefits for banks and the impact of financial regulations on default risk is not the same for conventional banks (CBs) and Islamic banks (IBs). The empirical evidence suggests that regulations that lessen overall default risk have a greater impact on IBs while those increasing default risk have a greater impact on CBs. Based on our findings we recommend that regulators should consider the different natures of CBs and IBs and tailor financial regulations to suit these operationally distinct financial intermediaries.     

Bank capital requirements and mandatory deferral of compensation

We analyze the interplay of capital requirements and mandatory deferral of compensation in reducing banks’ risk taking incentives. Two heterogenous banks fund uncorrelated projects with fully diversifiable risk or correlated projects with systematic risk. One of both banks can identify project types and is superior at managing risks. If projects are in abundant supply, full mandatory deferral of compensation is optimal as it allows a larger banking sector without increasing the default risk. With limited supply of projects, deferred compensation may misallocate risky projects to the bank that is inferior at managing risks, so that early compensation may be optimal.