Robert D Tollison

• ph.d
• Clemson University

Gordon Tullock, who passed away at the age of 92 on November 3, 2014, ranks justly near the top of the list of the “founding fathers” of the public choice research program. Most widely known in the academy as coauthor of The Calculus of Consent (Buchanan and Tullock 1962), Professor Tullock was not named, unfairly in our joint opinion, as co-recipi...

This study explores how economists present their ideas and findings in journal articles with a particular focus on the use of graphs. The study analyzes producing economics articles within a production theory framework and develops an economics article production function, in which graphs and words are inputs. Analyzing the articles published in Am...

Art, along with other “treasure assets,” has become a central object for investment opportunities. Investment return studies using hedonic and resale price regressions on different artistic periods and styles produce estimates of varying rates of return, predominately low rates with high standard deviations. The present study employs a new sample o...

We have both known Matt Lindsay for a long time, both as a colleague and friend. Tollison was a fellow graduate student with Matt in the doctoral program at the University of Virginia (c. 1960s), and Maloney met Matt at the 1977 meeting of the Southern Economic Association. Matt wrote under James M. Buchanan on Britain’s National Health Service, an...

The steady rise in the premiums charged to art buyers at auction (above hammer price) has been underway since 1992. This article, using a stable and bounded sample of repeat purchase of American works created before 1950, reveals that this tact has reduced hammer prices for that art. However, renewed and hyper-competitive efforts to bring more and...

Economist David Galenson, using both statistical and anecdotal methods, divides artists into two types, innovative or conceptual (who “peak” at younger ages) and experimental (peaking at older ages), to investigate how age is related to creativity. This well-known distinction has met with criticism and alternative theories of artistic productivity....

Schism and switching are important in religious markets when strict monopoly or force is not involved. The Protestant Reformation is an important case and may be seen as entry of a new firm into a previously monopolized market. This was essentially rent dissipation. Other cases may involve religious consumers switching to firms that better match th...

The effect of religion on political behavior and attachment has been a topic of intense interest in the United States and elsewhere. Less attention has been paid to the issue of secularism. Some analysts have viewed secularism as an absence of religious attachment, and a number of studies have utilized indices of secularization to analyze such topi...

This article considers whether presale auction estimates are unbiased predictors of price when "no-sales" are considered utilizing a newly constructed sample of over 500 works by eight early twentieth-century American artists. Unbiased presale auction estimates in predicting price, while expected, are generally not supported in previous work, but t...

The impatience with rational behavior that Ramsay MacMullen expresses in his review essay, The Translation of History, has apparently led him to misinterpret portions of our book, Origins of Roman Christianity. Moreover, in addition to locating so-called factual errors in our work, he recommends the Kahneman-Tversky attempt to inject psychology (an...

Tullock’s concept of rent seeking was the first statement of a quantitative principle about the social costs of such activities as lobbying and favor seeking. As such, this part of Tullock’s legacy to modern economics is one of his most important contributions.

Use of public humiliation as a deterrent to crime has a long history as does the debate over its effectiveness. A recent rule change in college football presents a natural experiment to test the effectiveness of so-called shaming penalties. In 2004 the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) mandated that the head official in football shoul...

The exact starting and ending dates of the Middle Ages may be difficult to specify, but historians are virtually unanimous that the period, however demarcated, represented the high tide of Christianity in Western Europe. Medieval Europe provides an interesting case study, not only of religion and politics, but of the overlap between them, which was...

We argue that pecuniary externalities are subject to rent seeking and hence must be accounted for in some fashion when one analyzes public projects and policies. We illustrate this point using the example of fairtrade and the compensation of indigenous workers.

This chapter discusses how the church reached monopoly status, Roman monopoly processes and market entry, and how the economics of early Christianity relates to contemporary religion. It concludes that studying the way in which the early church achieved market dominance is instructive not only in explaining second millennium events in religion mark...

We examine whether the DH Rule in MLB led to the trade of better hitting pitchers to the NL

We develop a simple insurance model of the secondary market for tickets to account for some of the observed spatial patterns of prices. Beyond ticket markets the model draws attention to the existence of subtle insurance fees in market prices that may be incorrectly attributed to breakdown of the law of one price or attributed solely to a cost-base...

We examine the correlation between federal government activity and the performance of the D.C. area's National Football League team, the Washington Redskins. We find a significantly positive, non-spurious, and robust correlation between the Redskins' winning percentage and the amount of federal government bureaucratic activity as measured by the nu...

We show that monopoly is the parent of monopsony when an industry employs specialized resources. This means that the welfare loss from monopoly and monopolization is larger than commonly portrayed. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

I recognize Elinor Ostrom’s work on solving the commons problem, and offer the simple caveat that the problem sometimes opens a Pandora’s box of political mischief (orrent seeking). KeywordsCommons-Ostrom

This article offers some comments on recent articles in this journal about the process of racial integration in certain sports venues. Nothing in these articles changes the basic result in an earlier article where the authors show that entre-preneurship by winning teams is the key to understanding which teams integrated first and why.

The Peltzman Effect is a well known and controversial theory in the literature. Studies have struggled to find a dataset that can accurately test for the presence of the effect. We have created a unique dataset and use a natural experiment from the sport of stock car racing to test the theory. Using race-level data from NASCAR events, we find stron...

This paper seeks an economic explanation for the fact that women's tees in golf are closer to the pin than men's tees, other things the same, in states of the old Confederacy. This is a robust empirical result that we explain as arising from a more courteous treatment of women in that part of the United States. We also note other explanations.

Queuing in response to prices below market-clearing levels increases the potential for conflict and violence among consumers. We consider how the potential for violence in queues varies with differences in demand and supply characteristics of the goods being considered, and the cause of submarket- clearing prices. In general, the potential for queu...

Besley’s treatment of principled agents is a major contribution to public choice and political economy. By focusing on politics as an agency problem, he has shown the way to a new generation of research on the interface of politics and economics.

This paper seeks an economic explanation for the fact that women’s tees in golf are closer to the pin than men’s tees, other things the same, in states of the old Confederacy. This is a robust empirical result that we explain as arising from a more courteous treatment of women in that part of the United States. We also note other explanations.

Innovation enables monopolists to lower their costs, expand their outputs, and reduce their prices. It is conventional to conclude that social welfare unambiguously increases as a result. Assuming linear demand and marginal cost, this paper shows, however, that innovation raises the opportunity cost of monopoly: as a firm enjoying market power beco...

Using National Football League (NFL) data from 1987 to 2007, we examine the hiring of African American head coaches. Our results partly Support an innovation explanation in that integration proceeded more rapidly in larger population centers. In contrast, we find only mixed and weak evidence that winning organizations proceeded first in hiring Blac...

We examine bequest-sharing rules where sibling rivalry creates wasteful competition for intergenerational transfers. We show that equal division of bequests minimizes rent-seeking expenditures by siblings while primogeniture maximizes rent-seeking costs. Our results lend theoretical support to the empirical findings of equal bequests without appeal...

I address public choice from the perspective of economics in this essay. The “perspective of economics” is taken to mean the application of the principles of maximizing behavior and demand and supply to institutions and behavior in the political world. I begin with a discussion of this familiar methodology, and then proceed to illustrate how the pr...

James M. Buchanan was born on October 3, 1919, in Murfeesboro, Tennessee. He grew up on a farm in this area of the United States. His post-secondary school education consists of a B.A. degree from Middle Tennessee State University (1940), an M.A. degree in economics from the University of Tennessee (1941), and a Ph.D. degree in economics from the U...

Italian translation of The Marketplace of Christianity (2006).

This startlingly original (and sure to be controversial) account of the evolution of Christianity shows that the economics of religion has little to do with counting the money in the collection basket and much to do with understanding the background of today's religious and political divisions. Since religion is a set of organized beliefs, and a ch...

The horrifying, tragic events of 9/11 made Americans aware of their vulnerability to terrorist attacks and triggered the creation of the Department of Homeland Security along with a substantial increase in federal spending to both thwart terrorist attacks and to increase our ability to respond to such emergencies. Much of this large increase in spe...

This article advances a theory of commodity bundling as an alternative to forward integration in household production. We argue, in particular, that a producer having market power over the sale of a final consumption good will sometimes find it profitable to bundle that good with one or more complements – and to sell the preassembled package to con...

It is found that alphabetized coauthored papers with two authors are more highly cited than non-alphabetized coauthored papers in both economics and agricultural economics. Alphabetized coauthored papers with more than two authors are not cited more, suggesting an optimal team size of two, ceteris paribus. We speculate that the preponderance of non...

This paper examines empirically the state-level impact of capital punishment on multiple murder rates for the period 1995–1999. In baseline tests—tests employing mixed panel data and using an estimation technique combining aspects of both fixed- and random-effects models—we show that executions reduce the single murder rate and that the use of elec...

This paper examines empirically the state‐level impact of capital punishment on multiple murder rates for the period 1995‐1999. In baseline tests—tests employing mixed panel data and using an estimation technique combining aspects of both fixed‐ and random‐effects models—we show that executions reduce the single murder rate and that the use of elec...

Over the past fifty years, the public choice research program has generated important insights into collective decision-making processes, especially as they operate within the political institutions of Europe and North America. Despite a half-century of progress, a great deal of unfinished business remains on the public choice research agenda. In t...

This paper suggests that, while medieval cathedrals served many purposes and, indeed, were some of the greatest technical achievements of their time, they served a rational economic purpose as well. Protestant entry into the market for Christian religion finally materialized in the early sixteenth century. The Roman Catholic Church did not make a '...

This special issue of Public Choice was designed to afford leading scholars the opportunity to summarize the current state of the public choice literature in key areas of public policy concern and to offer their thoughts about future directions of research. By laying out public choice frameworks for analyzing some of the major challenges confrontin...

In Policy Challenges and Political Responses, leading public choice scholars confront the most significant problems facing democratic societies at the dawn of the 21st century. Ranging widely across the policy spectrum, this authoritative volume demonstrates the vibrancy and continuing relevance of the public choice research program by applying its...

This article examines systematically the growth of the English language from the year 252 ce through 1985. Using a data set collected from the CD-ROM version of the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, we characterize the time series of new words added to the language, by year, calculate rates of growth and obsolescence, and disaggregat...

The Catholic Church reacted to the Protestant Reformation by taking on the defensive posture of an incumbent-firm monopoly fighting to survive in the face of new competition. Contemporary firms typically respond to rival entry by rewriting their corporate charter. So did the medieval Catholic Church. But the Council of Trent failed as a reorganizat...

This article examines systematically the growth of the English language from the year 252 cc through 1985. Using a data set collected from the CD‐ROM version of the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, we characterize the time series of new words added to the language, by year, calculate rates of growth and obsolescence, and disaggregat...

Contrary to conventional thinking about the purposes and effects of antitrust law enforcement, the personal fortune of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., tripled in the wake of the Supreme Court’s May 1911 order dissolving the Standard Oil trust. This paper summarizes alternative explanations for that unexpected outcome, tests them empirically and finds the...

The United States elects its presidents through an indirect mechanism called the Electoral College, which has its roots in the U.S. Constitution (Article II, Section 1 and the 12th Amendment). There are various intricacies and details about the evolution and functioning of the Electoral College, but for present purposes, a short explanation will su...

The concept of economic regulation originally found its way into the public choice literature in Stigler’s (1971) paper in the Bell Journal of Economics. The paper was a restatement of the time-honored capture theory of regulation, though unlike his precursors, Stigler formulated the capture theory as a testable economic model. He also showed sever...

One way to think about legislators is in terms of the interest-group theory of government and the demand and “supply” of legislation (McCormick and Tollison, 1981). Keep in mind that the use of “interest-group” as a modifier in this context is not meant to be pejorative. Individual citizens can want or demand laws for any reason — e.g., the law mak...

Clubs, whether one speaks of the Girl Guides, the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, a homeowners’ association, or the Republican Party, are private organizations whose members collectively consume (and often produce) at least one good or service that no one person has the capacity unilaterally to finance. Clubs are thus of interest to publi...

The make-or-buy decision is analyzed in a simple two-task principal-agent model. There is a cost-saving/quality tradeoff in effort provision. The principal faces a dichotomous choice between weak ("make") and strong ("buy") cost-saving incentives for the agent; the dichotomy is due to an incomplete-contracting limitation necessitating that one part...

The relationship between religion and income has been explored in several studies. In this paper, we extend this inquiry by arguing that religious participation, through its effects on preferences and net earnings potential, reduces participants’ incomes. Similarly, we argue that high incomes discourage religious participation by encouraging indivi...

The Alchian and Allen theorem predicts that it will be harder to find "good" apples in the State of Washington, a prime apple-growing region, than in, say, New York City, where the addition of shipping charges makes "bad" apples comparatively more expensive. We recast the theorem as a testable proposition by explicitly taking the supply side into a...

This article attempts to establish a link between voting theory and price theory. The median voter is characterized as a monopsonist who sets a price for the winning vote in an election. As such, the median voter can extract rents from the political sector as a function of the price of substitute winning voters, which in turn will depend on the dis...

This paper uses cross-sectional data from the 50 U.S. states to explore the impact of special- interest groups on the distribution of income. Holding educational attainment, median income, state government expenditures relative to gross state product, population density, race and other factors constant, we find that incomes are distributed more une...

Between 1974 and 1996, there was a substantial increase in the emphasis on academic research in universities located in the United States and elsewhere throughout the world. This increased emphasis was, and continues to be, reflected in a variety of increased incentives for faculty to produce research, including higher salaries, reduced teaching lo...

Chicago Political Economy (CPE) is a body of literature which analyzes government from the perspective of price theory and positive economics. It is essentially the Chicago version of the modern development of public choice theory. In CPE the state is a mechanism which is used by rational economic agents to redistribute wealth. Wealth transfers are...

I address public choice from the perspective of economics in this essay. The “perspective of economics” is taken to mean the application of the principles of maximizing behavior and demand and supply to institutions and behavior in the political world. I begin with a discussion of this familiar methodology, and then proceed to illustrate how the pr...

The Latin term, homo economicus, means simply “economic man.” It is also sometimes used to connote the general economic methodology which stresses maximizing behavior by individual actors. As such, this approach has proved useful, especially in its broader applications such as public choice, where the use of the economic man assumption has provided...

Rent seeking is the socially costly pursuit of wealth transfers. The concept of rent seeking was introduced to the economics profession by Tullock (1967). In his original presentation the basic idea that transfer seeking could lead to social costs was so simple that it has been automatically assumed that the idea had to have clear precursors in the...

We review and jointly test various competing theoretical and empirical models of U.S. federal deficits using annual data from 1889 to 1998. We find that tax smoothing matters and that political and interest group/distributional factors are also present in our results. Copyright 2002, Oxford University Press.

This paper seeks to explain the initial successes and failures of Protestantism on economic grounds. It argues that the medieval Roman Catholic Church, through doctrinal manipulation, the exclusion of rivals, and various forms of price discrimination, ultimately placed members seeking the Z good "spiritual services" on the margin of defection. Thes...

This paper analyzes the editorial screening process in economics, employing data from the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Quarterly Journal of Economics . We examine three issues: the decline of critical commentary in economics, the increased referencing behavior of authors, and the decline in the citation of economic re...

This paper treats racial integration as an innovation in economic process in which economic entities find it advantageous to utilize potentially more productive inputs previously unavailable due to law, custom, or managerial discretion. Data on the racial integration of Major League Baseball and Atlantic Coast Conference basketball are employed to...

The superstar model predicts skewness of market outcomes and returns to artist quality. We test and confirm these predictions using a unique data set on popular music.

As one of our friends once said, James M. Buchanan is a whole university in and of himself, or at least an economics department, a philosophy department, and a political science department combined in one person. Another way of putting this is to recognize that Buchanan has contributed to numerous literatures inside and outside of economics, so tha...