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Research Papers/Studies

Empowering the Poor through Property Rights Karol Boudreaux April 14, 2008 As a member of the Working Group on Property Rights of the U.N. Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, chaired by Madeleine Albright and Hernando de Soto, Enterprise Africa! lead researcher Karol Boudreaux contributed to chapter two of Making the Law Work for Everyone Volume II, titled, “Empowering the Poor through Property Rights.”

International Property Rights Index 2008 Karol Boudreaux February 26, 2008 Enterprise Africa! lead researcher Karol Boudreaux comments on land titling efforts in Africa as a means of erasing the problems of poverty.

Is Port Security Funding Making Us Safer? Veronique de Rugy November 1, 2007 Veronique de Rugy writes on the effectiveness of increased port security spending in this paper written for Audits of the Conventional Wisdom, a publication of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies.

An Analysis of the Office of Management and Budget's Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) for Fiscal Year 2008 Eileen Norcross, Joseph Adamson July 25, 2007 Senior Research Fellow Eileen Norcross and Research Associate Joseph Adamson analyze the results of PART to see how agencies have been rated over the five year period. They examine how much of agency budgets fall into different ratings categories, how ratings have changed for programs assessed multiple times, and how different types of programs fare in the PART ratings.

Growth in Regulation Slows Jerry Brito, Melinda Warren June 19, 2007 The 29th annual Regulators' Budget report, Growth in Regulation Slows: An Analysis of the U.S. Budget for Fiscal Years 2007 and 2008, examines the Budget of the U.S. Government to track the expenditures and staffing of federal regulatory agencies between 1960 and 2008.

Video Killed the Franchise Star: The Consumer Cost of Cable Franchising and Proposed Policy Alternatives Jerry Ellig, Jerry Brito August 18, 2006 By constraining competition, local video franchising imposes significant costs on two groups of consumers. Current cable subscribers pay higher prices than they would pay if there were competition, and potential customers forego cable TV service because they believe it is too expensive at current prices. Two decades of studies by government agencies and independent scholars consistently find that competition leads to lower cable rates. The FCC has authority under several federal statutes to identify and preempt unreasonable franchising practices.

Buried Online: State Laws That Limit E-Commerce in Caskets Asheesh Agarwal, Jerry Ellig June 30, 2006 Consumers seeking to purchase caskets online could benefit from the Supreme Court's 2005 decision that states cannot discriminate against interstate direct wine shipment. This working paper examines constitutional law and economic analysis relevant to state laws requiring independent casket retailers to be licensed funeral directors.

The Irony of Transparency: Consequences of Wireless Truth-in-Billing Jerry Ellig, James Nicholas Taylor June 13, 2006 Taxes, universal service charges, and other regulatory costs on wireless phone bills take $18.8 billion annually from consumers. That's equivalent to $110 per subscriber annually, $9.20 per month, or 15.5 percent of the average wireless phone bill. But the true cost to the economy is about 50 percent higher than that. The charges create an additional deadweight loss of $9.6 billion annually.

Moderating Regulatory Growth: An Analysis of the U.S. Budget for Fiscal Years 2006 and 2007 Susan E. Dudley, Melinda Warren May 11, 2006 Spending by federal regulatory agencies is scheduled to decline when adjusted for inflation according to “Moderating Regulatory Growth: An Analysis of the U.S. Budget for Fiscal Years 2006 and 2007,” this year’s edition of the annual report on regulatory spending and staffing by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2007, the Regulators’ Budget for the 68 regulatory agencies is estimated to be $44.2 billion, up slightly from $44 billion in 2006, but a 1.4 percent decline after adjusting for inflation.

Understanding the Transactions Costs of Transition: It's the Culture Stupid Steve Pejovich April 4, 2006 In the early 1990s, the former socialist states in Central and Eastern Europe began transition into free-market, private-property economies. Thirteen years later, the Index of Economic freedom lists only one country in the region as a free market country, seven countries are listed as mostly free, nine as mostly unfree, and two as repressive.

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