Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2025)

I examine how matrilineal relative to patrilineal kinship systems affect spousal cooperation. In matrilineal kinship systems, lineage and inheritance are traced through women.

Land ownership in the United States extends below ground, whereas most governments retain subsurface ownership. Which system generates greater resource use?

Why do developing countries fail to adopt the institutions and policies that promote development? Our answer is the violence trap. The trap is set by the unavoidable interdependence of economic and political development.

This paper analyzes how British colonial rule altered the club-like and competitive features of chiefdoms and weakened the incentives of political leaders to be accountable to citizens.

Governments continue to be concerned about kidnapping as a source of terrorist finance. A host of international commitments, underpinned by UN Security Council Resolutions and domestic laws, forbids the commercial resolution of terrorist-related kidnappings and prevents governments from making concessions to terrorists.

In 1756 Adam Smith reviewed Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality and claimed that it was indebted to the second volume of Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees. While much recent scholarship has taken this as the point of departure for studying Smith's engagement with Rousseau, the place of Mandeville in shaping that engagement has been largely neglected.

This essay offers a “nonideal” case for giving institutional priority to markets and private contracting in the basic structure of society. It sets out a “robust political economy” framework to examine how different political economic regime types cope with frictions generated by the epistemic limitations of decision-makers and problems of incentive incompatibility.