William F Shughart | Utah State University (original) (raw)

Papers by William F Shughart

Atlantic Economic Journal, 1989

Research in law and economics, 1991

This paper investigates the impact of public operating subsidies on the performance of public tra... more This paper investigates the impact of public operating subsidies on the performance of public transit systems across the U.S. and examines how political and economic factors enter into this subsidy-cost relationship. Specifically, using data on 118 local public transit agencies for the years 1984 through 1986, it is found that larger local, state, and federal subsidies translate into significantly higher operating costs per vehicle revenue hour. The adverse cost impact is particularly great for subsidies financed by state revenue sources and for federal subsidies transferred to transit systems serving small U.S. cities. State operating subsidies are estimated to account for half of the cost inflation associated with the public finance of transit deficits. This result suggests that when the bulk of a local transit system's operating deficit is financed by taxpayers residing outside the transit system's operating area, the cost share borne by local residents and, hence, their incentive to become informed about and to monitor the transit agency's performance is reduced.

Public Choice, Aug 1, 1989

Atlantic Economic Journal, Mar 1, 1986

Since U.S. combat forces left Indochina in 1973, no political, moral, financial, or personal priv... more Since U.S. combat forces left Indochina in 1973, no political, moral, financial, or personal privacy issue has left its mark on the American conscience like the question of legalized abortion. Opinions are divided as on no other topic of public policy debate. The controversy is tendentious, contentious, and sometimes violent. Almost no one is indifferent to the issue of legalized abortion, and the vast majority of individuals who have already formed an opinion stopped listening to arguments from the other side long ago. Most public opinion polls show the country sharply split on the question of abortion. Pro-abortion forces point to numbers indicating that a majority of Americans favor abortion rights when there is an imminent risk to the mother's health if the baby is carried to term, or in cases of rape or incest. Pro-lifers tout numbers showing a large majority of Americans opposed to ''abortion on demand.'' But few abortions are in fact performed to save the life of the mother; even fewer are performed to terminate pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. In modern society, the procedure of abortion is simply used to terminate unwanted pregnancies for many women. Bitter opposition to any proposal that would restrict in any way a woman's ''right to choose'' suggests that this is so. And if many abortion-minded women are in fact searching for an inexpensive way of disposing of an unwanted child-using abortion as a kind of foolproof birth control device-laws that make abortions less costly should

Public Choice, Feb 14, 2017

Such a bare-bones sketch of Bob Tollison's scholarly life and times hardly does justice to a man ... more Such a bare-bones sketch of Bob Tollison's scholarly life and times hardly does justice to a man who had a major impact on the direction of the literatures of public choice and applied microeconomic theory more broadly, supervised the doctoral dissertations of scores of graduate students, taught principles of economics and public choice to countless undergraduates and published several hundred peer-reviewed journal articles plus many books and monographs. Neither does it allow people either inside or outside the ivory tower's walls who did not know him personally to grasp Bob's astonishing intellectual energy, his work habits, his generosity, the friendships he forged with colleagues and coauthors, or the important influences he had on the academic careers of many other scholars. It is for those reasons that I contacted and received commitments from 14 of Bob's closest friends and most frequent coauthors soon after news of his passing reached me by telephone and email on that black Monday morning last October, asking them to contribute personal remembrances of him, to summarize some of the research projects on which they had collaborated or that they found to be especially noteworthy, or simply to write about their interactions with Bob on campus, at professional conferences, in governmental posts, or other venues. I have written two such essays myself (Shughart 2017a, b), but Bob was such a giant in the economics profession-a proverbial force of nature-that I alone could not possibly comprehend-or even know about-all of the ways in which he affected other lives and career trajectories.

Public Choice, Oct 27, 2009

Robert Tollison has been a major figure in the economics profession for 40 years, contributing a ... more Robert Tollison has been a major figure in the economics profession for 40 years, contributing a vast body of scholarship to the literatures of public choice, industrial organization, the economics of sports and the economics of religion to name just a few of the fields of study to which he has applied his fertile mind and the methodologies of positive economic science. Perhaps more than any other person, he conceived and fostered the development of empirical public choice. What is perhaps more important, over a distinguished career that began-freshly conferred University of Virginia Ph.D. in hand-with his appointment to the Cornell University business school faculty in 1969, included two tours of duty in Washington, DC (at the Council of Economic Advisers early on and, later, at the Federal Trade Commission) and wound its way through the halls of academe at College Station, Miami, Blacksburg, Clemson, Fairfax, Oxford, and then back to Clemson, Bob has engaged generations of students and colleagues in his research program, generously sharing ideas, insisting on getting those ideas down on paper and in the process not only launching or advancing the careers of many other scholars, but also forging lifelong friendships. A small subset of those friends gathered in Clemson, South Carolina, on November 6-8, 2007, to celebrate Bob's 65th birthday and to participate in a conference honoring his life and work. Sponsored by Clemson University's John E. Walker Department of Economics, the conference's organizers commissioned a series of original research papers for presentation and discussion over the course of the event's two-day working schedule. This special issue of Public Choice compiles those papers and the comments on them written by invited discussants. Despite Bob's wide-ranging research interests, Public Choice is the proper place for recognizing his scholarship. As a student of Nobel laureate James Buchanan, no man has done as much as he has done to advance the public choice research program. Bob was for many years a member of the faculty of the Center for Study of Public Choice when it was housed at Virginia Tech and, after the Center had moved to George Mason University, served as its Director.

Public Choice, Apr 1, 2022

Competition policy (antitrust policy in the United States) engages the subfields of microeconomic... more Competition policy (antitrust policy in the United States) engages the subfields of microeconomics (price theory), industrial organization, law and economics, and public choice. The last was a latecomer to the list because of the persistence of naïve "public interest" explanations for competition policy's origins, purposes, and effects. Even after a half-century of policy analyses in general and of public regulation of prices and conditions of entry into myriad industries around the world-showing that such interventions almost always benefit politically powerful special interests rather than society at large-most scholars still carelessly and mistakenly assume that private plaintiffs, attorneys called to the antitrust bar, the public law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, judges and other parties involved in antitrust proceedings have no motivations beyond preserving competitive marketplaces. My aim here is to bring antitrust policy more firmly within the ambit of public choice reasoning, which helps explain why antitrust intervention often either is ineffective or perverse. Competition law enforcement is a first cousin of economic regulation and, hence, should be evaluated as such.

Springer eBooks, 2010

It is no secret that college sports are big business. In 2006, the latest year for which budget i... more It is no secret that college sports are big business. In 2006, the latest year for which budget information is available, the biggest of America’s big-time intercollegiate athletic programs reported total revenues of 241,365,000 (National Collegiate Athletic Association 2008: 18). Set against total expenses amounting to241,365,000 (National Collegiate Athletic Association 2008: 18). Set against total expenses amounting to 101,805,000 the same fiscal year, participating in NCAA-sanctioned regular season and postseason play netted the school an eye-popping 139,560,000. Even more remarkably, nearly all of the revenue credited to 2006’s top college sports program actually was generated directly by athletics-</font >related activities, such as ticket sales, stadium concessions, alumni contributions, guarantees, conference distributions, and licensing agreements; “allocated revenue”, including direct and indirect institutional support, student fees, and other transfers from external sources accounted for only139,560,000. Even more remarkably, nearly all of the revenue credited to 2006’s top college sports program actually was generated directly by athletics-related activities, such as ticket sales, stadium concessions, alumni contributions, guarantees, conference distributions, and licensing agreements; “allocated revenue”, including direct and indirect institutional support, student fees, and other transfers from external sources accounted for only 4,530,000 or slightly less than 1.9% of the total (National Collegiate Athletic Association 2008: 21).

Public Choice, Apr 1, 2006

Hurricane Katrina revealed massive governmental failure at the local, state and federal levels. T... more Hurricane Katrina revealed massive governmental failure at the local, state and federal levels. This commentary brings the modern theory of property rights and public choice reasoning to bear in explaining why officials failed to strengthen New Orleans's levee system despite forewarning of its weaknesses, failed to pre-deploy adequate emergency supplies as the storm approached landfall and failed to respond promptly afterwards. Its main lesson is that no one should have expected government to be any more effective when confronted with natural disaster than it is in more mundane circumstances. Disasters are very political events.

Social Science Research Network, Jan 3, 2018

America’s history of selective consumption taxes dates back to the colonial era, when revolutiona... more America’s history of selective consumption taxes dates back to the colonial era, when revolutionaries protested against taxes on tea and paper goods. While the Revolution was prompted in part by opposition to selective consumption taxes, this chapter describes how Alexander Hamilton implemented a selective consumption tax on whiskey to cover the American war debt shortly after America won its independence. The whiskey tax had characteristics common to selective consumption taxes we see today.

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2018

Managerial and Decision Economics, Aug 1, 1997

Southern Economic Journal, Apr 1, 1991

Foreword Preface Introduction Normative and Positive Theories of Antitrust The Origins and Critiq... more Foreword Preface Introduction Normative and Positive Theories of Antitrust The Origins and Critique of Antitrust The Interest-Group Theory of Government Private Interests at Work Business Enterprise The Antitrust Bureauracy The Congress The Judiciary The Private Antitrust Bar The Political Economy of Antitrust Using Antitrust to Subvert Competition Reform in the Realm of Interest-Group Politics Select Bibliography Index

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2018

Public Choice, Jun 1, 2003

A quarter century ago, the prolific Richard Posner, then a member of the faculty at the Universit... more A quarter century ago, the prolific Richard Posner, then a member of the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School, helped lead the powerful intellectual forces of what has since become known as the 'law-and-economics movement' onto the field of antitrust (Posner, 1976). Although that movement was already well underway in the academic journals, the first edition of Antitrust Law codified the Chicago school's distinctive approach and added momentum to a revolution in antitrust thinking soon to be given effect under the leadership of William Baxter at the Justice Department and James C. Miller III at the Federal Trade Commission, Ronald Reagan's first appointees to key posts in the federal antitrust bureaucracy. Orthodox antitrust theory and policy were then in compete disarray. Antitrust lawyers and economists, the law enforcement agencies and the courts collectively were in thrall to the 'structure-conduct-performance' paradigm, which held that undue industrial concentration was the chief source of the anticompetitive behavior perceived endemic to unfettered private markets. Left unchecked, large firms, either unilaterally or in concert with their few rivals, routinely exploited their 'market power' by bankrupting smaller competitors, excluding potential new entrants, stifling innovation, and raising prices above competitive levels, or so the story went. Big was bad. The value of a vigilant and vigorous antitrust policy was rarely questioned. In order to protect the public from the abuses of private monopoly, mergers between competitors frequently must be blocked, the use of a plethora of exclusionary practices forbidden, and collusive price-fixing agreements ruthlessly ferreted out and undone. If, at the end of the day, dismantling large firms was the only way to reduce industrial concentration and restore competitive market conditions, then so be it. The Chicago school's contribution was to insist that woolly headed thinking about the causes and consequences of industry structure be displaced by analytical approaches grounded in the tools of neoclassical price theory. Not

Atlantic Economic Journal, 1989

Research in law and economics, 1991

This paper investigates the impact of public operating subsidies on the performance of public tra... more This paper investigates the impact of public operating subsidies on the performance of public transit systems across the U.S. and examines how political and economic factors enter into this subsidy-cost relationship. Specifically, using data on 118 local public transit agencies for the years 1984 through 1986, it is found that larger local, state, and federal subsidies translate into significantly higher operating costs per vehicle revenue hour. The adverse cost impact is particularly great for subsidies financed by state revenue sources and for federal subsidies transferred to transit systems serving small U.S. cities. State operating subsidies are estimated to account for half of the cost inflation associated with the public finance of transit deficits. This result suggests that when the bulk of a local transit system's operating deficit is financed by taxpayers residing outside the transit system's operating area, the cost share borne by local residents and, hence, their incentive to become informed about and to monitor the transit agency's performance is reduced.

Public Choice, Aug 1, 1989

Atlantic Economic Journal, Mar 1, 1986

Since U.S. combat forces left Indochina in 1973, no political, moral, financial, or personal priv... more Since U.S. combat forces left Indochina in 1973, no political, moral, financial, or personal privacy issue has left its mark on the American conscience like the question of legalized abortion. Opinions are divided as on no other topic of public policy debate. The controversy is tendentious, contentious, and sometimes violent. Almost no one is indifferent to the issue of legalized abortion, and the vast majority of individuals who have already formed an opinion stopped listening to arguments from the other side long ago. Most public opinion polls show the country sharply split on the question of abortion. Pro-abortion forces point to numbers indicating that a majority of Americans favor abortion rights when there is an imminent risk to the mother's health if the baby is carried to term, or in cases of rape or incest. Pro-lifers tout numbers showing a large majority of Americans opposed to ''abortion on demand.'' But few abortions are in fact performed to save the life of the mother; even fewer are performed to terminate pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. In modern society, the procedure of abortion is simply used to terminate unwanted pregnancies for many women. Bitter opposition to any proposal that would restrict in any way a woman's ''right to choose'' suggests that this is so. And if many abortion-minded women are in fact searching for an inexpensive way of disposing of an unwanted child-using abortion as a kind of foolproof birth control device-laws that make abortions less costly should

Public Choice, Feb 14, 2017

Such a bare-bones sketch of Bob Tollison's scholarly life and times hardly does justice to a man ... more Such a bare-bones sketch of Bob Tollison's scholarly life and times hardly does justice to a man who had a major impact on the direction of the literatures of public choice and applied microeconomic theory more broadly, supervised the doctoral dissertations of scores of graduate students, taught principles of economics and public choice to countless undergraduates and published several hundred peer-reviewed journal articles plus many books and monographs. Neither does it allow people either inside or outside the ivory tower's walls who did not know him personally to grasp Bob's astonishing intellectual energy, his work habits, his generosity, the friendships he forged with colleagues and coauthors, or the important influences he had on the academic careers of many other scholars. It is for those reasons that I contacted and received commitments from 14 of Bob's closest friends and most frequent coauthors soon after news of his passing reached me by telephone and email on that black Monday morning last October, asking them to contribute personal remembrances of him, to summarize some of the research projects on which they had collaborated or that they found to be especially noteworthy, or simply to write about their interactions with Bob on campus, at professional conferences, in governmental posts, or other venues. I have written two such essays myself (Shughart 2017a, b), but Bob was such a giant in the economics profession-a proverbial force of nature-that I alone could not possibly comprehend-or even know about-all of the ways in which he affected other lives and career trajectories.

Public Choice, Oct 27, 2009

Robert Tollison has been a major figure in the economics profession for 40 years, contributing a ... more Robert Tollison has been a major figure in the economics profession for 40 years, contributing a vast body of scholarship to the literatures of public choice, industrial organization, the economics of sports and the economics of religion to name just a few of the fields of study to which he has applied his fertile mind and the methodologies of positive economic science. Perhaps more than any other person, he conceived and fostered the development of empirical public choice. What is perhaps more important, over a distinguished career that began-freshly conferred University of Virginia Ph.D. in hand-with his appointment to the Cornell University business school faculty in 1969, included two tours of duty in Washington, DC (at the Council of Economic Advisers early on and, later, at the Federal Trade Commission) and wound its way through the halls of academe at College Station, Miami, Blacksburg, Clemson, Fairfax, Oxford, and then back to Clemson, Bob has engaged generations of students and colleagues in his research program, generously sharing ideas, insisting on getting those ideas down on paper and in the process not only launching or advancing the careers of many other scholars, but also forging lifelong friendships. A small subset of those friends gathered in Clemson, South Carolina, on November 6-8, 2007, to celebrate Bob's 65th birthday and to participate in a conference honoring his life and work. Sponsored by Clemson University's John E. Walker Department of Economics, the conference's organizers commissioned a series of original research papers for presentation and discussion over the course of the event's two-day working schedule. This special issue of Public Choice compiles those papers and the comments on them written by invited discussants. Despite Bob's wide-ranging research interests, Public Choice is the proper place for recognizing his scholarship. As a student of Nobel laureate James Buchanan, no man has done as much as he has done to advance the public choice research program. Bob was for many years a member of the faculty of the Center for Study of Public Choice when it was housed at Virginia Tech and, after the Center had moved to George Mason University, served as its Director.

Public Choice, Apr 1, 2022

Competition policy (antitrust policy in the United States) engages the subfields of microeconomic... more Competition policy (antitrust policy in the United States) engages the subfields of microeconomics (price theory), industrial organization, law and economics, and public choice. The last was a latecomer to the list because of the persistence of naïve "public interest" explanations for competition policy's origins, purposes, and effects. Even after a half-century of policy analyses in general and of public regulation of prices and conditions of entry into myriad industries around the world-showing that such interventions almost always benefit politically powerful special interests rather than society at large-most scholars still carelessly and mistakenly assume that private plaintiffs, attorneys called to the antitrust bar, the public law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, judges and other parties involved in antitrust proceedings have no motivations beyond preserving competitive marketplaces. My aim here is to bring antitrust policy more firmly within the ambit of public choice reasoning, which helps explain why antitrust intervention often either is ineffective or perverse. Competition law enforcement is a first cousin of economic regulation and, hence, should be evaluated as such.

Springer eBooks, 2010

It is no secret that college sports are big business. In 2006, the latest year for which budget i... more It is no secret that college sports are big business. In 2006, the latest year for which budget information is available, the biggest of America’s big-time intercollegiate athletic programs reported total revenues of 241,365,000 (National Collegiate Athletic Association 2008: 18). Set against total expenses amounting to241,365,000 (National Collegiate Athletic Association 2008: 18). Set against total expenses amounting to 101,805,000 the same fiscal year, participating in NCAA-sanctioned regular season and postseason play netted the school an eye-popping 139,560,000. Even more remarkably, nearly all of the revenue credited to 2006’s top college sports program actually was generated directly by athletics-</font >related activities, such as ticket sales, stadium concessions, alumni contributions, guarantees, conference distributions, and licensing agreements; “allocated revenue”, including direct and indirect institutional support, student fees, and other transfers from external sources accounted for only139,560,000. Even more remarkably, nearly all of the revenue credited to 2006’s top college sports program actually was generated directly by athletics-related activities, such as ticket sales, stadium concessions, alumni contributions, guarantees, conference distributions, and licensing agreements; “allocated revenue”, including direct and indirect institutional support, student fees, and other transfers from external sources accounted for only 4,530,000 or slightly less than 1.9% of the total (National Collegiate Athletic Association 2008: 21).

Public Choice, Apr 1, 2006

Hurricane Katrina revealed massive governmental failure at the local, state and federal levels. T... more Hurricane Katrina revealed massive governmental failure at the local, state and federal levels. This commentary brings the modern theory of property rights and public choice reasoning to bear in explaining why officials failed to strengthen New Orleans's levee system despite forewarning of its weaknesses, failed to pre-deploy adequate emergency supplies as the storm approached landfall and failed to respond promptly afterwards. Its main lesson is that no one should have expected government to be any more effective when confronted with natural disaster than it is in more mundane circumstances. Disasters are very political events.

Social Science Research Network, Jan 3, 2018

America’s history of selective consumption taxes dates back to the colonial era, when revolutiona... more America’s history of selective consumption taxes dates back to the colonial era, when revolutionaries protested against taxes on tea and paper goods. While the Revolution was prompted in part by opposition to selective consumption taxes, this chapter describes how Alexander Hamilton implemented a selective consumption tax on whiskey to cover the American war debt shortly after America won its independence. The whiskey tax had characteristics common to selective consumption taxes we see today.

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2018

Managerial and Decision Economics, Aug 1, 1997

Southern Economic Journal, Apr 1, 1991

Foreword Preface Introduction Normative and Positive Theories of Antitrust The Origins and Critiq... more Foreword Preface Introduction Normative and Positive Theories of Antitrust The Origins and Critique of Antitrust The Interest-Group Theory of Government Private Interests at Work Business Enterprise The Antitrust Bureauracy The Congress The Judiciary The Private Antitrust Bar The Political Economy of Antitrust Using Antitrust to Subvert Competition Reform in the Realm of Interest-Group Politics Select Bibliography Index

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2018

Public Choice, Jun 1, 2003

A quarter century ago, the prolific Richard Posner, then a member of the faculty at the Universit... more A quarter century ago, the prolific Richard Posner, then a member of the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School, helped lead the powerful intellectual forces of what has since become known as the 'law-and-economics movement' onto the field of antitrust (Posner, 1976). Although that movement was already well underway in the academic journals, the first edition of Antitrust Law codified the Chicago school's distinctive approach and added momentum to a revolution in antitrust thinking soon to be given effect under the leadership of William Baxter at the Justice Department and James C. Miller III at the Federal Trade Commission, Ronald Reagan's first appointees to key posts in the federal antitrust bureaucracy. Orthodox antitrust theory and policy were then in compete disarray. Antitrust lawyers and economists, the law enforcement agencies and the courts collectively were in thrall to the 'structure-conduct-performance' paradigm, which held that undue industrial concentration was the chief source of the anticompetitive behavior perceived endemic to unfettered private markets. Left unchecked, large firms, either unilaterally or in concert with their few rivals, routinely exploited their 'market power' by bankrupting smaller competitors, excluding potential new entrants, stifling innovation, and raising prices above competitive levels, or so the story went. Big was bad. The value of a vigilant and vigorous antitrust policy was rarely questioned. In order to protect the public from the abuses of private monopoly, mergers between competitors frequently must be blocked, the use of a plethora of exclusionary practices forbidden, and collusive price-fixing agreements ruthlessly ferreted out and undone. If, at the end of the day, dismantling large firms was the only way to reduce industrial concentration and restore competitive market conditions, then so be it. The Chicago school's contribution was to insist that woolly headed thinking about the causes and consequences of industry structure be displaced by analytical approaches grounded in the tools of neoclassical price theory. Not