The United States Postal Service on Friday reported a net loss of nearly $2.3 billion for the third quarter of fiscal year 2019, putting it on pace to lose nearly $8 billion in 2019.

She was a scholar who looked out the window, to adapt a phrase from her fellow Nobel laureate Ronald Coase, and she showed empirically and experimentally how institutions evolve to manage common-pool resources “without any regulation by central authorities or privatization.”

Famed economist Ronald Coase’s vision of a free market in radio waves is increasingly being realized. But a consortium of satellite companies that is seeking to circumvent the auction process could easily undo decades of progress.

There’s a huge debate about homework and whether it helps kids learn during the school year. The evidence we found suggests that students who spend more time doing homework don’t necessarily get better grades.

When it comes to wildlife conservation and other environmental concerns, the ideas of free markets and private property are frequently laughed off as silly by the planet’s most strident defenders. However, the incentives—the motivations to behave in a certain way—that come along with private property are strong. After all, we never worry about cows going extinct. But can these insights on property and incentives be extended to other aspects of our lives and our world? Special guest Howard Baetjer, author of Free Our Markets: A Citizen’s Guide to Essential Economics, joins Antony Davies and James Harrigan as they explore this and more on this week’s episode of Words & Numbers.

The nature of politics creates fascinating and challenging incentives both for political decision-makers such as politicians and government bureaucrats *and* for voters who aren't always as knowledgeable or rational as many of us would like to believe.