March 28, 2023
At Grove City College, we are pleased to host an annual conference for students from around the world presenting papers in the long tradition of Austrian economics. In perusing this page, you will be exposed to the impressively high quality undergraduate students I’m privileged to work with everyday.
See, for instance, Alex Sodini’s paper on Jean-Baptiste Say’s monetary theory, Sebastian Anastasi’s paper on the organizational economics of Prohibition, or my former student Janna Lu’s paper on milk subsidies to highlight only a few.
This year, we were pleased to hear from Jonathan Newman, who applied Robert Higgs’ ratchet effect to monetary policy and my own professor—a 1983 GCC grad—the inimitable Pete Boettke, on “Capitalism, Socialism, and our Future.”
Check out Boettke’s talk:
Pete is a proud GCC grad, and we’re always thrilled to have him return. Notice that Grove City College tie he’s wearing.
If you have students interested in these ideas, send them our way—contact Jeff Herbener for more details. Bonus: You and your students would get to visit GCC’s beautiful campus, designed by the Olmstead Brothers who also designed Central Park and parts of the University of Chicago, Yale, Cornell, and others.
Beginning in 2004, Grove City’s conference has been pleased to host other luminaries, such as Robert Higgs, Peter Klein, Guido Hulsmann, Benjamin Powell, Mark Thornton, Walter Block, Robert Murphy, Joe Salerno, Per Bylund, Chris Coyne, and many others. If you’re ever around GCC during the balmy ides of February, we’d love to have you stop by the conference!
I also want to highlight a few outstanding papers that came out of my seminar course last fall and have been presented at recent ASSC’s.
1.
Sebastian Anastasi's paper, cleverly titled "Organic Order," explores credible commitments in the context of CSA arrangements. His abstract:
“This paper develops a theory of how Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) arrangements ensure commitment on the part of farmers in the absence of explicit contracts or third-party certification. Due to the unique payment timeline of CSAs, where members pay for their produce before the growing season commences, and the lack of formal, legal protections it is possible for farmers to engage in opportunism. This opportunism could include shirking, employing objectionable growing practices, or decreasing the size of members’ weekly share of produce. I find that CSAs foster commitment by augmenting the power of the repeat purchase mechanism. Their community-building efforts create relational bonds and enable effective multilateral punishment. Additionally, farmers choose to grow crops with low monitoring costs. The CSA demonstrates how commitment can be ensured through private, informal mechanisms.”
2.
Kurtis Hingl offers a unique theory for the emergence of the first universities.
“Why do universities offer room and board? Is the market not capable of providing food and housing, among other amenities, more efficiently than the university can? One logical answer can be found by viewing universities as clubs that govern information transactions. Because education is a subset of the market for information, it necessarily faces the problems of information asymmetry. These problems include hold-up, post-contractual opportunism, and free riding—any of which can lead to market breakdown. Information is a hot commodity, however, so entrepreneurs do find creative ways to govern the transactions and allow markets to clear. An illuminating case is provided by the evolutionary rise of integrated colleges in medieval Europe’s first non-integrated universities. These colleges were transaction-governing clubs using in-house amenities to help manage the club and distribute club goods while mitigating the problems of information asymmetry. This college-as-a-club theory can also be extended to today’s universities and explain variation in the array of in-house amenities.”
3.
Much has been written by economists on dowry payments and the bride price. Yet, the "dower" has been comparatively overlooked. Caleb VanGrouw explores the dower as a means of protecting women in societies where their property rights are lacking.
“This paper develops an economic theory of the purpose of Islamic dower payments and the conditions necessary for their existence. Because women are susceptible to holdup, they demand contractual protection from abandonment and abuse in marriage. Successful marriage contracts must protect against opportunistic behavior within marriage, protect against undesired contract termination, and provide exit possibilities. In section one, I provide an overview of Islamic dower and distinguish it from other forms of marriage payments. In section two, I investigate the nature of marriage contracts and propose necessary societal conditions for dower payments to arise. In section three, I test my predictions by examining dower payments in 20th century Palestine. I demonstrate dower is a market solution to gender inequality in some of the most oppressive societies in the world.”
4.
Lastly, Janna Lu applies Henry Hansmann's underrated framework to explain the organization of "Fire Clubs" in colonial America.
“In 1724, nineteen Bostonians founded a private fire company, the Fire Society, as a commercial entrepreneurial non-profit. Even though fire clubs were established in other cities within two decades, none adopted the same governance structure. Members of the Fire Society in Boston signed a constitution, met four times a year, and pledged to protect each other’s property in the event of a fire. After the Great Boston Fire of 1760, seven more fire companies emerged, with similar governance structures as the Fire Society. In this paper, I demonstrate how fire protection services emerging as a non-profit in Boston minimized the total costs of transactions, through a comparative analysis of the costs of market contracting and ownership. This paper adds an empirical example to Hansmann’s theoretical framework of the relative costs of ownership while illustrating how the private sector overcame collective decision-making costs and supplied goods with public attributes in the market.”
Remember the names of these gifted young scholars.