Date of Completion

8-18-2017

Embargo Period

8-18-2018

Keywords

economic freedom, civil liberties, human rights, Google, free speech

Major Advisor

Richard Langlois

Associate Advisor

Nishith Prakash

Associate Advisor

Metin Coşgel

Field of Study

Economics

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Open Access

Campus Access

Abstract

In this dissertation, I consider several facets of the putative connection between economic freedom and civil liberties, most famously expressed in Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. The most widely-used datasets in this literature are the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World and Freedom House’s Freedom in the World indexes. In chapter 1, I analyze the relationship between these indexes to better understand the meaning of research that finds a relationship between the freedoms they purport to measure. In chapter 2, I analyze the relationship between economic freedom and state control of speech as expressed through requests to remove content from Google properties. In chapter 3 (previously published in the Journal of Private Enterprise), I analyze the relationship between economic freedom and the physical integrity rights measured by the CIRI Human Rights Dataset.

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