Thread by @srajagopalan

Students routinely email me asking me what they should read in public choice/constitutional political economy. I am going to post some of the classic papers in the field once or twice a week. Follow this thread. #publicchoicecanon

The first is a classic #virginiapoliticaleconomy paper: An Economic Theory of Clubs by James Buchanan. I've been thinking a lot about this paper recently and it's a critical step bridging the gap between pure private & pure public goods. #publicchoicecanon darp.lse.ac.uk/papersDB/Bucha…

This is another classic #virginiapoliticaleconomy paper: The Pure Theory of Government Finance by James Buchanan (1949). One of the first papers outlining Buchanan's 'politics as exchange' - while critiquing the state as organism theory. #publicchoicecanon jstor.org/stable/pdf/182…

Adding three papers on rent seeking today by Tullock, Krueger, and Bhagwati. Like many great ideas, it is simple and obvious the moment it is explained. Individuals and firms are said to seek rents when they try to obtain benefits for themselves through the political process.

The idea of rent-seeking is introduced by Tullock in this 1967 paper, where he shows that the welfare losses of monopolies, exceed those previously estimated as deadweight losses or the Harberger triangle. walkerd.people.cofc.edu/400/Sobel/2A-3…

Anne Krueger (1974), actually dubbed these Tullockian and other welfare losses rent seeking. The label stuck. She emphasised the competitive process in seeking these rents. also developed some of the ideas by Bhagwati and Desai on import restrictions. jstor.org/stable/pdf/180…

Jagdish Bhagwati (1982) developed this more in his Directly Unproductive Profit-seeking (DUP) Activities model-activities that yield pecuniary returns but do not increase the availability of goods and services in the economy-in the context of int. trade. jstor.org/stable/pdf/183…