James M. Buchanan Tennessee, USA, 1919
He studied economics at the University of Tennessee and earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1948, where he received the intellectual influence of Frank H. Knight. He founded the new Virginia School of Political Economy. He was a professor and researcher at the Universities of Virginia, of California, Los Angeles and Florida, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Buchanan specialized in issues of Treasury and made ​​important studies on the role of inflation and tax, as well as the nature of the public debt. One of the main theorists called Public Choice Theory, along with G. Tullock, Buchanan study addressed the constitutional political economy, with the intention not to limit the analysis to the operation of the processes of public decision making in the framework of established rules, but also to analyze how these rules are adopted and the possibility of measuring its effectiveness. As he himself defined the field, it is to "understand how constitutions should be designed so that politicians who seek public interests can survive." James M. Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1986 for his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision-making.