Robert D. Tollison, 65 years on

William F. Shughart II - 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 beganfreshly conferred University of Virginia Ph.D. in handwith 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 68, 2007, to celebrate Bobs 65th birthday and to participate in a conference honoring his life and work. Sponsored by Clemson Universitys John E. Walker Department of Economics, the conferences organizers commissioned a series of original research papers for presentation and discussion over the course of the events two-day working schedule. This special issue of Public Choice compiles those papers and the comments on them written by invited discussants. Despite Bobs 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. As a rule, the volume follows the conferences format, which consisted of seven panels, each for the most part consisting of two papers on topics related to the principal areas of the literature to which Bob has madeand continues to makesignificant contributions. With only a few minor exceptions, the original research papers are paired with their corresponding written commentaries. Although the articles published herein were not subjected to a formal refereeing process, all withstood careful editorial scrutiny both as to substantive content and expository lucidity. The conference opened with a session devoted to empirical public choice. The first of the papers, by Mark Crain and Nicole Crain, uses empirical methods to explore the properties of the time series of Bob Tollisons writings, testing the influences on his scholarly productivity of, among other things, his academic affiliations and his taste for co-authorship. The Crain and Crain paper speaks for itself and, hence, is one of the few contributions to the volume that did not seem to call for written commentary. Brian Goff comes next, with a typical Tollisonian examination of the impact of the educational backgrounds and prior employment histories of presidential economic advisers on economic policy outcomes. He finds, as Bob Tollison frequently has observed, that ideas may matter, but not much. The exception is non-defense federal spending, where budget outlays tend to be higher when a presidents economic advisers had been trained or employed by an Ivy League institution prior to their governmental service. However, Goff also finds the significance of that influence to differ according to presidential administration, possibly implying that presidents select their economic advisers to provide the advice they want to hear rather than for independent analysis of policy proposals. Session two focused on the economics of sports, or what Bob has called sportometrics. The papers presented then, one by Raymond Sauer, Kerry Waller and Jahn Hakes, the other by Robert McCormick (with Tollison as co-author), demonstrate the importance of the insights into economic behavior that can be gained by stepping outside the boundaries of ordinary markets into the wide world of sportsMajor League Baseball in the first case and the game of golf in the second. Are (betting) markets efficient? Perhaps, as Sauer et al. ultimately conclude. Why, holding other things including gender differences in muscle strength constant, are womens tees closer to the pin than mens tees? And can the differences in tee placement, which differ systematically between courses in the South and in the North, be explained by chivalry? That is one implication of the McCormick-Tollison contribution, based on a rich dataset covering more than 15,000 golf courses in all 50 US states. Bob Tollison was influenced strongly by George Stiglers work on the economic theory of regulation and that was the topic that ended the conferences first morning of work. Bruce Yandles paper discusses the decline in economic regulation and the explosive growth in social regulation that began in the United States during the 1970sevents that also shifted regulatory enforcement from the realm of the common law to that of legislatively enacted statute lawand attributes those developments to the rise of national media markets and to a corresponding demand on the part of nationally operating businesses for federal as opposed to state-level regulation. Richard Higgins and Arijit Mukerhee then presented a theoretical analysis of the deregulation of US telecommunications markets in the early 1980s, which mandated vertical separation between local and long-distance telephony. Their insightful analysis suggests that characterizing that policy initiative as deregulation is a misnomer. Separating local and long-distance markets actually complicated the regulatory process by forcing regulators to set the prices at which the providers of long-distance voice and data transmission services would be allowed to connect to (access) local customers. Access pricing arguably demanded more regulatory intervention than had been demanded when AT&T merely was a vertically integrated natural monopoly. That session was followed by the presentation of three papers by students who at the time were (or had been enrolled) in Bobs undergraduate courses at Clemson. I have chosen to collect those papers, two on various aspects of sportometricsby Herman Demmink III and by Adam Pope (in collaboration with Bob)plus one on the economics of religionby Anca Cojocat the end of this special issue. No formal comments on those papers were invited, although all generated a great deal of interest from the confere (...truncated)