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The purpose of this paper is to integrate classical elite theory into theories of constitutional bargains.

Qualitative methods/surveys/case studies.

Open-ended constitutional entrepreneurship cannot be forestalled. Constitutional entrepreneurs will almost always be social elites.

The research yields a toolkit for analysing constitutional bargains. It needs to be used in historical settings to acquire greater empirical content. Need to be applied to concrete historical cases to do economic history. Right now it is still only institutionally contingent theory.

Formal constitutions do not, and cannot, bind. Informal constitutions can, but they are continually evolving due to elite pressure group behaviors.

Liberalism needs another method to institutionalize itself!

Open-ended nature of constitutional bargaining overlooked in orthodox institutional entrepreneurship/constitutional economics literature.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a theory of sovereign entrepreneurship, which is a special kind of political entrepreneurship.

This paper uses qualitative methods/historical survey.

Sovereignty is rooted in self-enforced exchange of political property rights. Sovereign entrepreneurship is the creative employment of political property rights to advance a plan.

Because a polity’s constitution is determined by its distribution of political property rights, sovereign entrepreneurship and constitutional change are necessarily linked. The author illustrated how sovereign entrepreneurship can be applied by using it to explain the rise of modern states.

In addition to studying instances of sovereign entrepreneurship in distant history, scholars can apply it to recent history. Sovereign entrepreneurship can be especially helpful as a tool for doing analytic narratives of low-n cases of political-economic development, especially when those polities attract interests for being “development miracles.”

This paper uses treats sovereignty as a political property right.

Since Hayek’s pioneering work in the 1930s, the Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT) has been presented as a disequilibrium theory populated by less-than-perfectly rational agents. In contrast, we maintain that (1) the Austrian business cycle theory is consistent with rational expectations and (2) the post-boom adjustment process can be understood in an equilibrium framework. Hence, we offer a new interpretation of the existing theory. In doing so, we also address concerns raised with Garrison’s (2001) diagrammatic approach, wherein the economy moves beyond the production possibilities frontier. Our interpretation might accurately be described as a monetary disequilibrium approach grounded in an implicit general equilibrium framework with positive costs of reallocation.

This paper applies the logic of economic calculation to the actions of autocrats. We model autocrats as stationary bandits who use profit-and-loss calculations to select institutions that maximize their extraction rents. We find in many cases autocrats achieve rent maximization through creating and protecting private property rights. This in turn yields high levels of production, with expropriation kept low enough to incentivize continued high production. Importantly, while this leads to increasing quantities of available goods and services over time, it does not lead to true development; that is, the coordination of consumer demand with producer supply through directing resources to their highest-valued uses. We apply our model to the authoritarian governments of Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, showing how they function as quasi-corporate governance organizations in the business of maximizing appropriable rents.

What role does government play in determining the medium of exchange? Economists weighing in on the issue have typically espoused one of two views. State theorists credit government with the emergence and continued acceptance of commonly accepted media of exchange. In contrast, spontaneous order theorists find little need for government, maintaining that money emerges and continues to circulate as a result of a decentralized market process. History suggests a more subtle theory is required. We provide a generalized theory of the emergence and perpetuation of money, informed by both approaches and consistent with recent theoretical and empirical advances in the literature.

This introduction summarizes each of the papers in Studies in Austrian Macroeconomics. It begins with a brief overview of the core ideas and development of modern Austrian macroeconomics, focusing on its theory of the business cycle. The papers are then discussed by parts, starting with the papers on Austrian monetary and business cycle theory, followed by those addressing the relationship between the US and Canadian economic performance, and concluding with the three papers on the political economy of regulation and crisis.