Production Theory

The corn, sugar, and ethanol industries in the US are all part of a complex system of government subsidies and other favors, writes Dave Albin.

Labor unions work to prevent increases in the productivity of workers, which is ultimately the only way to increase real wages, writes George Reism

Fiscal policy means simply that the government steals the public’s assets (taxes them), and then either spends the money itself  or donates the funds to others 

Tony Yu’s Firms, Strategies, and Economic Change joins a growing list of book-length treatments applying Austrian economics to the theory of the firm, corporate strategy, innovation, new venture formation, and other popular issues in management.

In this paper we tackle two shortcomings of the present efficiency wage models. Firstly, they do not fully account for labor heterogeneity, thus implying that high-effort and low-effort units of labor are interchangeable.

The authors’ proposed solutions are interesting but ultimately disappointing. Laudably, they do call for what they believe to be the privatization of urban transit. 

This paper deals with the recent empirical phenomenon of intra-industry trade, i.e., trade in similar goods between similar countries. It treats this phenomenon from the point of view of the theory

It is within the bowels of government where the real yes-men problem lies. Here, there is no automatic feedback mechanism of the market to rely upon, to quell any incipient tendencies in the direction of yes-manning.

What sets Austrians apart from mainstream economists is methodology and consequent analyses. The first section contains an analysis of their methods, which are found wanting. 

This paper reviews Austrian approaches to the firm and drafts a theory that emphasizes the firm as a market phenomenon. Here the firm is a vehicle for imaginative entrepreneurs to create artificially high factor density,