All these premises having, as I think, been clearly made out, it is impossible that the rulers now on earth should make any benefit, or derive any the least shadow of authority from that, which is held to be the fountain of all power, Adam's private dominion and paternal jurisdiction; so that he that will not give just occasion to think that all government in the world is the product only of force and violence, and that men live together by no other rules but that of beasts, where the strongest carries it, and so lay a foundation for perpetual disorder and mischief, tumult, sedition and rebellion, (things that the followers of that hypothesis so loudly cry out against) must of necessity find out another rise of government, another original of political power, and another way of designing and knowing the persons that have it, than what Sir Robert Filmer hath taught us.

Two Treatises of Government.

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

Anarchy, state, and utopia

Capitalism and Freedom

A recent literature has constructed top income shares time series over the long run for more than twenty countries using income tax statistics. Top incomes represent a small share of the population but a very significant share of total income and total taxes paid. Hence, aggregate economic growth per capita and Gini inequality indexes are sensitive to excluding or including top incomes. We discuss the estimation methods and issues that arise when constructing top income share series, including income definition and comparability over time and across countries, tax avoidance, and tax evasion. We provide a summary of the key empirical findings. Most countries experience a dramatic drop in top income shares in the first part of the twentieth century in general due to shocks to top capital incomes during the wars and depression shocks. Top income shares do not recover in the immediate postwar decades. However, over the last thirty years, top income shares have increased substantially in English speaking countries and in India and China but not in continental European countries or Japan. This increase is due in part to an unprecedented surge in top wage incomes. As a result, wage income comprises a larger fraction of top incomes than in the past. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and empirical models that have been proposed to account for the facts and the main questions that remain open.

Top Incomes in the Long Run of History

Why Do People Evade Taxes? Summaries of 60 Surveys

This paper examines relative tax burden of transition economies from a microeconomic perspective. It employs data from the Tax Misery Index and the Index of Economic Freedom to compare the tax burden of transition economies to that of more developed market economies. It then creates a hybrid index, which provides another, more representative look at relative tax burdens from an investor's perspective.

Public Finance in Transition Economies: How Competitive Are They?

The long and the short of blackmail is that it consists of two acts, each of which, were they to occur alone, would be considered legal by everyone. Yet somehow, when these elements occur together, virtually all commentators who have ever written on the subject consider the complex act consisting of both elements to be unlawful. We wish to rebut this assertion.

Blackmail from A to Z: A Reply to Joseph Isenbergh’s ‘Blackmail from A to C’

The purpose of this paper is not to fully analyze the various programs or arguments that have been given over the years to justify or attack foreign aid, but rather to examine the practice of foreign aid through the lens of economic analysis and constitutional analysis, which has not really been done in the literature. Most analyses of foreign aid do not apply either utilitarian economic analysis (or they don’t apply it properly) or constitutional analysis to this very important issue. The aim of the present paper is to fill that gap in the literature.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2809461_code2139.pdf?abstractid=2809461&mirid=2

Robert W. McGee

Papers

Why Do People Evade Taxes? Summaries of 60 Surveys

Public Finance in Transition Economies: How Competitive Are They?

Blackmail from A to Z: A Reply to Joseph Isenbergh’s ‘Blackmail from A to C’

An Economic and Constitutional Analysis of Foreign Aid

Why Study Ethics?