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"Mueller, Dennis C"
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Public choice, social choice, and political economy
Since World War II a large literature has arisen that uses the methodology of economics to examine the behavior of governments and the actors in them. Some scholars refer to their research as public choice, some as social choice, and still others as political economy. This article discusses the distinctions among these three terms. It concludes that all of the research falling under these three headings has much in common, and that people who refer to their work as public choice or political economy are essentially employing identical methodologies. Contributions to public choice, narrowly defined, are more often positive and empirical analyses of government behavior than those in social choice, narrowly defined.
Journal Article
The Impact of Corporate Governance on Investment Returns in Developed and Developing Countries
We shed light on three conundrums in the literature on investment: why investments out of different sources of finance earn different returns, why different studies report different patterns of returns across sources of finance, and why companies in developing countries make greater use of external equity capital to finance their investment than do companies in developed countries. We show that the strength of corporate governance systems affects the preferred source of financing, which in turn helps to explain why investments financed in different ways exhibit significantly different rates of return. We find considerable differences between developed and developing countries in the effectiveness of corporate governance systems in aligning managers and shareholders' interests.
Journal Article
Corporate Governance and the Returns on Investment
We analyze the impact of corporate governance institutions and ownership structures on company returns on investment by using a sample of more than 19,000 companies from 61 countries across the world. We show that the origin of a country’s legal system proves to be the most important determinant of investment performance. Companies in countries with a legal system of English origin earn returns on investment that are at least as large as their costs of capital. Companies in all countries with civil‐law systems earn on average returns on investment below their costs of capital. Furthermore, differences in investment performance that are related to a country’s legal system dominate differences that are related to ownership structure. We also present considerable evidence that managerial entrenchment worsens a company’s investment performance.
Journal Article
Gordon Tullock: economic gadfly
This article discusses Gordon Tullock’s impact on the economics profession and on public choice in particular. It measures this impact through his publications, his editorship of the journal
Public Choice
, and his association with the Center for Public Choice.
Journal Article
James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and \The Calculus\
The Calculus of Consent (Buchanan and Tullock 1962) is one among a handful of contributions to public choice that can truly be called a classic. It was one of the building blocks laying the foundation for what would become an immense research program falling under the heading of public choice. I can identify four lasting contributions to the public choice literature from The Calculus. The first would be the analysis of the optimal voting rule (Buchanan and Tullock 1962:6391). Buchanan and Tullock addressed the problem of choosing an optimal voting rule by introducing two categories of costs associated with collective actions. Decision-making costs are the time and effort required to reach a collective decision; they are assumed to rise as the majority required for passage expands. The external costs of collective decision-making are the expected losses to a person on the losing end of a collective decision made using any voting rule other than unanimous consent. Those costs fall as the majority required to pass an issue increases. The optimal voting rule minimizes the sum of these two costs. An important implication of this analysis is that the optimal majority might be any majority between zero and one, with a simple majority having no special status. This negative judgment of the simple majority rule is a recurring theme throughout The Calculus, but perhaps receives its strongest treatment in Chap. 10, which reproduces Tullock's (1959) Some Problems of Majority Voting. Using the example of farmers voting on road expenditures, Tullock showed how a simple majority rule would encourage a majority coalition to form and to vote for lavish expenditures on roads serving the coalition's members, to be in part financed by those in the losing coalition. Major contribution number three of The Calculus is one of the first rigorous analyses of logrolling (Chaps. 10 and 11). Perhaps the most important and lasting contribution of the book, however, is the introduction of a two-stage process for collective decision-making. In the first, the constitutional stage, the rules of the political game are chosen. In the second, the post-constitutional stage, the in-period political game plays out. Adapted from the source document.
Journal Article
Gordon Tullock and Public Choice
Gordon Tullock is one of the founders of the field of public choice, of the Public Choice Society, and of the Public Choice Center. He is a coauthor with James M. Buchanan of one of the true classics in the public choice field—The Calculus of Consent. He has been one of the field's most prolific scholars, with his research spanning virtually all dimensions of the public choice field. This article surveys his major contributions.
Journal Article
Constraining Leviathan
This article commemorates James M. Buchanan and his contributions to public choice and constitutional political economy. It focuses on what Buchanan had to say about constraining the State, or as he often referred to it, Leviathan. It concentrates on a handful of his major works that I think capture important elements of his thinking. It discusses Buchanan’s writings on public debt and government deficits; the size of the state; federalism; and taxation, among other things. It is argued that the main emphasis in Buchanan’s work as it pertained to constraining the State was to include provisions in the constitution that could achieve this end. These included a balanced budget amendment, rules governing the expansion of the money supply, constraints on the types of taxes that could be levied, linking expenditure proposals to the taxes that would finance them, earmarked taxes, and a generality principle, which would avoid a majority coalition’s exploitation of a minority. The article also includes a discussion of the current constitutional crisis in the United States.
Journal Article
The State and Religion
The proposition that the State should be separated from the Church is well accepted by students of democracy in the West. Huntington ((1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon & Schuster) went so far as to claim that the separation of Church and State was a salient feature of Western Civilization, which explains why Western countries tend to be democracies, while democracy in other cultures is rare. Huntington's claim obviously presumes that the State is separated from the Church in Western democracies. A closer look at the relationships between State and Church in these countries, however, reveals considerable financial and institutional linkages between the two institutions. Democratic states in the West subsidize religious organizations and religious schools, allow or even sometimes compel religious instruction in public, supposedly secular schools, and enact laws, which advance religious agendas. This article documents and discusses these state-church relationships. It goes on to recommend the implementation of a complete separation of Church and State.
Journal Article
Constitutional democracy
Constitutional Democracy systematically examines how the basic constitutional structure of governments affects what they can accomplish.This relationship is especially important at a time when Americans are increasingly disillusioned about government's fundamental ability to reach solutions for domestic problems, and when countries in the former.
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