
Christopher CoyneGeorge Mason University | GMU · Department of Economics
Christopher Coyne
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Publications (283)
This chapter surveys the main ideas and tensions in the classical liberal treatment of defense, international relations, and war-making. This sets the stage for a discussion of the feasibility of interstate federalism by identifying key issues and challenges that such a system will need to address to be effective. In order to identify these issues...
Conventional wisdom tells us that other-regarding sentiments are desirable as they yield positive social outcomes. However, the consequences of other-regarding behaviors are broadly ambiguous and may have unintended consequences, especially when they must pass through institutional filters. In this paper, we use the Samaritan’s Dilemma model to und...
What is the connection between mass surveillance and institutions of individual agency, freedom, and self-governance? Recent literature on “surveillance capitalism” argues that, over the past two decades, the capitalist Big Tech companies have commodified personal data for profit. This commodification goes beyond gathering information to improve th...
Mariana Mazzucato argues that capitalism needs to be rebuilt around private-public partnered “missions.” To facilitate these missions, Mazzucato provides seven pillars to serve as guidelines. Using Mazzucato’s pillars, we critically review US government efforts to develop the local economy and establish new political institutions through foreign ai...
Unintended consequences entail the attainment of ends not originally envisioned when a person decides to pursue a particular course of action; the employment of particular means, expected to produce a certain desired consequence, actually produces different or additional consequences not intended ex-ante by the chooser. This chapter discusses both...
This Element explores the topics of terrorism, counterterrorism, and the US government's war on terror following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. It draw on insights from Austrian and public choice economics. First, the foundations of the economics of terrorism are discussed emphasizing that the behaviors of terrorists and counter-terrorists...
Violent conflict is a global phenomenon with devastating costs to individuals and their communities. Government experts and policymakers have responded with efforts to reduce violence and make peace. Such efforts are often implemented from the top-down, however, and are consequently limited in their peacemaking capacities. Top-down peacemaking is l...
This review discusses the unique features of Austrian economics and some of the recent contributions of this school of thought. We organize these contributions in different research “buckets” in the hope that this will be a useful guide to readers while demonstrating the ongoing relevance of the contemporary Austrian school of economics for advanci...
Contrary to predictions by many experts, Ukraine’s military has been resilient in the face of the Russian government’s invasion. Drawing on the logic of polycentric defense, this article helps explain how Ukraine has remained resistant against a conventionally more powerful adversary. We argue that polycentric defense in Ukraine has four benefits t...
Existing scholarship examines the moral status of markets, identifying some markets as “noxious”—markets deemed morally objectionable due to the background conditions preceding exchange or the resulting consequences. This literature primarily focuses on market exchanges between private parties. We broaden the analysis to include government markets—...
Some economists argue that ignorance, real-world complexities and market failures undermine the ability of self-regulating markets to operate in a way that approximates an efficient process. In more recent discussions, cognitive processes, in the form of various biases, have become the primary focus of analytical attention. This paper counters thes...
Using economic reasoning, Julian Simon offered crucial insights into a range of pressing issues including the environment, immigration, and economic development. The main lesson from Simon’s scholarship is that the ultimate resource does not reside in the ground (natural resources), or even in the accumulated wisdom and knowledge in books and scien...
U.S. government security along the U.S.–Mexican border has been increasingly militarized. This domestic militarization has been influenced by U.S. government military intervention abroad. Preparing for and executing foreign interventions involves investing in physical and human capital to effectively coerce and control the target population. The U....
Social life can take on a variety of forms – some violent, others peaceful. One type of social arrangement that is especially conducive to peace are friendships, that is, relationships based on mutual trust and dependence. The market is one important but often neglected space where we can practice habits of peacefulness and develop friendships. Mar...
U.S. government security along the U.S.–Mexican border has been increasingly militarized. This domestic militarization has been influenced by U.S. government military intervention abroad. Preparing for and executing foreign interventions involves investing in physical and human capital to effectively coerce and control the target population. The U....
The fatal conceit of foreign intervention refers to the limitations faced by governments using discretionary power to address perceived problems in foreign societies. Drawing on evidence from the “Afghanistan Papers”—a collection of internal government documents compiled by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) and re...
Written for an audience of students, general readers, and economists alike, this Element is a primer on the field of the economics of conflict and peace. It offers a reasonably comprehensive, systematic, and detailed overview - even if in broad strokes - of the field's orthodox and heterodox history of thought and current theories and evidence. The...
How can public policy best deal with infectious disease? In answering this question, scholarship on the optimal control of infectious disease adopts the model of a benevolent social planner who maximizes social welfare. This approach, which treats the social health planner as a unitary “public health brain” standing outside of society, removes the...
The COVID-19 outbreak prompted governments around the world to employ a range of emergency methods to combat the pandemic. In many countries these emergency measures relied heavily on police powers, which refer to the capacity of governments to forcefully regulate behavior and impose order as defined by those in control of the state apparatus. Thro...
Cambridge Core - Economics: General Interest - Defense, Peace, and War Economics - by Christopher J. Coyne
Nonviolent action involves private parties coming together to resist undesired actions from other groups both within or outside of society. Nonviolent action is decentralized and emergent in nature, and has played a role as a type of bottom-up response to crises. However, this form of action has largely been neglected as a potential solution to cri...
The US government relies heavily on military intervention to address a wide range of potential and actual crises abroad. This integrated approach to military intervention often includes rebuilding the economic, legal, social, and political aspects of societies using the tools of defense, diplomacy, and development. Drawing on research in Austrian e...
In 1919, in the wake of the Central Power’s defeat in World War I, Ludwig von Mises published his second book, Nation, State, and Economy. The book explores the consequences of war and the type of political and economic arrangements likely to generate a lasting peace in the future. This paper reviews the book’s key themes regarding the relationship...
A growing literature focuses on the “global public goods” generated by foreign interventions. Global public goods have traditional public good characteristics, but their benefits extend across societies and regions. We analyze how well-intentioned foreign interventions to provide global public goods can also result in global public bads. These bads...
This paper analyzes the economic reconstruction of Iraq following the 2003, U.S.-led invasion. Tracing the foundations and trajectory of the reconstruction, we explain how efforts have fallen prey to the four reconstruction traps identified by Coyne and Mathers (2010) and Coyne and Pellillo (2011). These traps have hampered attempts to rebuild Iraq...
What role do whistleblowers play in democratic politics? This paper answers this question by analyzing the political economy of whistleblowing within democratic political institutions. Democratic politics is characterized by numerous principal-agent problems creating significant space for opportunism. Whistleblowers help to resolve these principal-...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present and compare alternative theoretical frameworks for understanding entrepreneurship policy: targeted interventions to increase venture creation and/or performance. The authors contrast the Standard view of the state as a coherent entity willing and able to rectify market failures with an Individualisti...
Economists model state-provided defense as a value-added, public good. The actual government provision of defense, however, is a “black box” that is rarely analyzed. This chapter contributes to opening this black box by analyzing the U.S. defense budget. We provide an institutional explanation for why scarce public resources are often squandered on...
Nontaxation and Representation: The Fiscal Foundations of Political Stability. By Kevin M. Morrison. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 170p. $88.00 cloth. - Volume 15 Issue 4 - Christopher J. Coyne
In Creating a Learning Society, Joseph Stiglitz and Bruce Greenwald examine the role of knowledge in economic growth. They view economic growth as an impersonal and automatic phenomenon. The history of economic growth, however, suggests that it is a creative and personal process. We argue that the analytical framework deployed by Stiglitz and Green...
Purpose
– US military contracting has been plagued by systematic corruption, fraud, and waste during both times of peace and war. These outcomes result from the inherent features of the US military sector which incentivize unproductive entrepreneurship. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
– Drawing on the insights o...
This chapter provides a comprehensive survey of the contributions of the Austrian school of economics, with specific emphasis on post-WWII developments. We provide a brief history and overview of the original theorists of the Austrian school in order to set the stage for the subsequent development of their ideas by Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek....
Newhard (2016) challenges our argument, according to which the inefficiency of market-provided national defense is an empirical question rather than a logical implication of the fact that privately provided national defense confronts a free-rider problem. We show that his argument holds only under the assumption that private contributions to public...
This paper traces the roots of police militarization in the United States to a variety of foreign military interventions, including WWII and the Vietnam War. We analyze how these earlier conflicts, in conjunction with the subsequent War on Drugs and War on Terror, contributed to the militarization of domestic police. Also discussed is how the effec...
National defense is the textbook example of a public good. In order to understand how economists present public goods to undergraduates, we analyze 50 texts from across three widely taught undergraduate economics courses: principles of economics, intermediate microeconomics, and public finance. We find that textbooks overwhelmingly present national...
James Buchanan’s protective state emerges at the constitutional level and protects the core rights of citizens via internal security, contract enforcement, and defense against external threats. This paper focuses on the potential for the protective state to produce anti-liberty outcomes. I identify five specific channels through which the activitie...
We analyze the relationship between foreign aid and the “culture of contracting.” Contracting culture refers to cultural characteristics — trust, respect, level of self-determination, and level of obedience — which allow for impersonal exchange. Theoretically, aid may affect the culture of contracting for better or worse. We empirically analyze thi...
The Militarization of Policing and the Future of U.S. Politics - Volume 13 Issue 3 - Christopher J. Coyne
This paper analyzes how the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or "drones" in foreign interventions abroad have changed the dynamics of government activities domestically. Facing limited or absent constraints abroad, foreign interventions served as a testing ground for the domestically constrained U.S. government to experiment with drone techno...