Bad ethics can make for bad economic outcome.  Bad ethics are defined hedonically as the infliction of pain on others for private advantage.  The infliction of pain is often justified by 'Just World Theories', which state that everyone gets what they deserve.  Market liberalism (and its...

Adam Smith rejected Mandeville's invisible-hand doctrine of 'private vices, public benefits'.  In The Theory of Moral Sentiments his model of the 'impartial spectator' is driven not by sympathy for other people, but by their approbation.  Approbation needs to be authenticated, and in Smith's...

I examine the effect of labor income taxation in life-cycle models where work experience builds human capital.  In this case, the wage no longer equals the opportunity cost of time - which is, instead, the wage plus returns to work experience.  This has a number of interesting consequences. ...

State capacity matters for growth.  I test Bates' explanation of pre-colonial African states.  He argues that trade across ecological boundaries promoted states.  I find that African societies in ecologically diverse environments had more centralized states.  This is robust to reverse...

This paper studies border effects in Eastern Africa by exploiting a consumer price data set covering 4 out of 5 EAC member states, 39 cities and 24 goods over the period 2004-2008. The Law-of-One-Price (LOP) is tested by running level regressions on relative prices with city-pairs the unit of...

This paper challenges the growing consensus in the literature (Stone, 2005; Dodds, 2007) that medieval English peasants and manorial managers were price responsive in their production decisions.  Using prices of and acreages planted with wheat, barley, and oats of 49 manors held by the bishop of...

Voter education is crucial to promote voters' participation.  The question that remains is how voter education campaigns can reach a significant part of the population.  During the 2009 Mozambican elections, a field experiment implemented three voter education interventions: the distribution...

The allocation of children's time among different activities may be important for their cognitive and non-cognitive development.  In our work we exploit time use diaries from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children to study the effect of time allocation across a wide range of alternative...

African societies exported more slaves in colder years.  Lower temperatures reduced mortality and raised agricultural yields, lowering slave supply costs.  Our results help explain African participation in the slave trade, which predicts adverse outcomes today.  We use an annual panel of...

This survey deals with an issue that is extremely important for a wide range of applied issues - the magnitude of aggregate labor supply responses to various changes in the economic environment.  In addition to being a very important issue, it is also well known to be quite controversial.  In...