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This paper discusses the work of two twentieth-century liberal economists, Friedrich Hayek and James Buchanan, who have made lasting contributions to our understanding of the role of the market in a free society. I argue that they offer significantly different but complementary visions of the value of the market as a system of individual freedom. Hayek's vision is of the price system as a marvel of spontaneous order which solves a fundamental economic problem – that of making efficient use of a totality of knowledge that is divided between individuals. Buchanan's vision is of the market as a space in which individuals are free to make voluntary exchanges. In his words, ‘this is all that there is to it’: the market is not a solution to any collective problem. These visions have a common blind spot. Both writers recognise the need for programmes of social insurance and consider how they should structured so as to be as compatible as possible with the workings of a market economy and a liberal democracy. But, I argue, neither sees the full importance of social insurance in a justification of the market system.

The paper applies connectivity measures—membership status, contiguity, inverse distance, and power projection—to investigate North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) defense burden sharing at the operational or (defense spending) categorical levels (i.e., personnel, infrastructure, equipment, and operations and maintenance [O&M]) during the post-Cold War era, 1991–2022. Alternative spatial weights, assigned to allies' operational-based spillovers, indicate diverse free-riding responses with the greatest free riding characterizing equipment, followed by O&M and then personnel outlays. Infrastructure spending, which does not permit much substitution among allies, is understandably characterized by the least inter-ally free riding. After the Wales Summit and Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014, there are marked changes to NATO free riding at the operational levels, with equipment spending displaying reduced free riding. Generally, there is little evidence of a positive reaction to increased Russian military expenditures; however, there is some enhanced operational spending by NATO allies nearest to Russia after 2014. Also, we estimate simultaneous spatial autoregressive models to gauge inter-operational spending responses to the four kinds of spillovers, where we find interesting inter-operational substitutions and complementarities.

I document implicit egoism across 3 million sentencing decisions. In administrative data from the U.S. New Orleans District Attorney's office for 1988–1999 and Chile for 2014–2019, sentences are 8% longer and 2% longer, respectively, when the judge and defendant's first initials match. Name letter effects measure implicit self-esteem. Faced with ego threat, high self-esteem individuals punish negatively valenced targets as self-regulation. In New Orleans, effects are larger for Black defendants labeled by police as “N” rather than “B.” Consistent with recent theoretical models, Black–White sentence differences double for egoist judges, and this effect is especially pronounced among Black judges.

This paper examines the impact of historical lynching on the economic opportunities of Black individuals today. Our results indicate that past lynchings have an adverse effect on the current economic opportunities of Black people, likely arising from persistent racial prejudice dating back to the early 20th century. We emphasize the importance of rapid urbanization, industrialization, and population mixing in the US South post-1880, which led to heightened competition among racial groups for economic, social, and political prominence, ultimately resulting in a surge of lynchings. Our findings survive a series of robustness checks.

Countries with abundant natural resources often possess greater wealth, yet the impact of these resources on economic growth remains unclear. This paper examines how natural-resource abundance and its volatility impact economic growth. It questions whether natural resources themselves are a curse or if the negative growth effects are due to the volatility of natural-resource revenues. The study also investigates how volatility of natural resources affects key economic growth channels, such as investment, human capital, and institutional quality. Using the standard panel model and panel smooth transition regression (PSTR), the paper analyzes data from 125 countries (1988–2020). Results show that natural-resource abundance boosts economic growth, contradicting the resource-curse theory. However, the growth impact is non-linear and varies with natural-resource volatility. Countries with high volatility face up to a 22 percentage point annual GDP growth loss compared with those with low volatility, suggesting that volatility and poor government responses drive the resource-curse paradox, not the abundance of resources per se.

We explore the use of experts in arbitration proceedings by analysing public procurement contract disputes in Italy. Balancing cost with accuracy, participants to a contract select arbitration when speedy dispute resolution is valued highly. Alternative dispute resolution mechanisms tend to give appointed arbitrators discretion in how to proceed. Consequently, principal-agent problems can arise. Using an inverse-probability-weighted approach, we show that the use of an expert causes a slowing down of the case resolution, without having an effect on the outcome of the dispute nor resolving uncertainty as measured by unanimous decisions by the panel of arbitrators. Conflict resolution mechanism designers should consider the alignment of incentives between the disputants and the service providers.

How do culture and development interact to determine women's empowerment? I develop a simple model of women's labor supply in which economic development simultaneously reduces the stigma against women working and relaxes the consumption constraint that often forces poor women to work. The model predicts that women's labor supply will follow a U-shaped relationship, falling and then rising as development proceeds. In addition, in countries with more patriarchal values, women's labor supply will be lower, fall over a greater income range, and then rise more slowly on the upward sloping portion of the curve. I investigate and confirm these predictions in a broad sample of countries employing six different measures of historical patriarchy as well as a composite measure of patriarchal history. These findings indicate that as economic development proceeds, women's labor supply will diverge across countries as differences in the intensity of patriarchal values play an ever larger role in the allocation of women's labor.

This paper underlines the importance of accounting for non-base compensation in explaining the motherhood wage gap. We consider two alternative measures of hourly wage using Italian EU-SILC data from 2007 to 2019: the base-wage and the full-wage. The former refers to the contractual base wage, while the latter includes performance-based bonuses, productivity bonuses, commissions, pay incentives, and other extra payments. We address the endogeneity issues of motherhood and examine the effect of motherhood status across various quantiles of the wage distribution for the two hourly wage measures. Empirical findings provide evidence of a motherhood base-wage premium, which becomes nonsignificant when using the full-wage measure, suggesting that non-base compensation is a source of inequality for mothers. These findings are consistent across the wage distribution. Exploring potential heterogeneity across macro-regions and periods, we find no notable regional disparities except minor distinctions for the Southern regions, alongside a decline in the base-wage premium over time and the emergence of a full-wage penalty in recent years. A comparative analysis with a sample of men reveals that fathers enjoy a premium with both wage measures. Nevertheless, fatherhood is also associated with reduced extra remunerations, yet to a lesser extent than motherhood.

Competition and cooperation are not always at odds and contributions to public goods are almost never one-off one-shot temporally isolated events. We examine voluntary contribution in a new public good experiment where “self-love” competitive motivations and time dynamic interdependencies are simultaneously considered. The competitive motivations are manipulated via subjects competing in each group (intragroup competition) for higher return factors on their public expenditure, whereas time dynamic interdependencies are modeled by letting returns from previous periods available for future contributions to public goods (CG). We ran two control conditions where intragroup competition (C) and time dynamic interdependencies (G) are separately implemented. Our findings showed that shares of endowment contributed were significantly greater and increasing over time when endowments growth and heterogeneous returns factors were simultaneously introduced. This effect can be attributed to return factors obtained in previous periods. Accordingly, wealth exponential growth has been greatly accelerated relative to our control condition. Distributive equity concerns have been also documented. Although Gini coefficients were significantly lower in the presence of heterogeneous return factors and endowments growth, inequality trends seemed to converge at control condition values in the long term.

Beliefs linking zodiac signs to personality traits, life outcomes, and well-being remain widespread across various cultures. This study examined the relationship between Western zodiac signs and subjective well-being in a nationally representative American sample from the General Social Survey (N = 12,791). Well-being was measured across eight components: general unhappiness, depressive symptoms, psychological distress, work dissatisfaction, financial dissatisfaction, perceived dullness of one's life, self-rated health, and unhappiness with marriage. Parametric and nonparametric analyses consistently revealed no robust associations between zodiac signs and any of the well-being variables, regardless of whether demographic factors were controlled for. The effect sizes were negligible, accounting for 0.3% or less of the variance in well-being, demonstrating that zodiac signs lack predictive power for well-being outcomes. An additional analysis revealed that astrological signs were no more predictive of than random numbers. Thus, a randomly generated number between 1 and 12 is statistically as predictive of one's well-being as one's zodiac sign. These findings challenge popular astrological claims about the influence of zodiac signs on well-being and quality of life.