Some economists have argued theoretically that the private minting of circulating precious metal coins would be inefficient: Due to information asymmetry, money-users would be chronically victimized by low-quality or underweight coins. An examination of experience with private mints during gold...

Can public mood swings that make all voters undergo an ideological shift towards a policy, hurt the electoral performance of that policy? The answer depends interestingly on the operations of an apolitical, viewership-maximizing dominant media. The media chooses news quality about fundamental...

I test whether public-sector ownership reduces conventional measures of market risk by using an exogenous event to the air transportation industry. I find that government-sponsored enterprises show lower price volatility than non-government-sponsored enterprises, arguably due to the government's...

The paper examines local food and food production in the Dominican Republic and how local agriculture intersects with the tourism and restaurant sectors. It argues that not only has tourism created a demand for local produce, and thus provided jobs and income for Dominicans far removed from the...

How much did the telegraph improve market integration in imperial China? We exploit differences in the timing of telegraph construction in different prefectures in the late 19th to the early 20th centuries to show that telegraph presence in both prefectures decreased the monthly grain price...

We propose and develop an algebraic approach to revealed preference. Our approach dispenses with non algebraic structure, such as topological assumptions. We provide an algebraic axiom of revealed preference that subsumes previous, classical revealed preference axioms, and show that a dataset is...

We estimate the survival time of nearly 7,000 firms in a dozen of high-income and middle-income countries in a scenario of extreme economic distress, using the World Bank's Enterprises Surveys. Under the assumption that firms have no incoming revenues and cover only fixed costs, the median...

Cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin are known to be vulnerable to so-called “doublespending” attacks, where the same digital currency is used to execute multiple different transactions simultaneously. Little is known, however, about the underlying reasons for this vulnerability. Here we...

Tourists – overnight visitors – to the Dominican Republic have increased from 560,000 in 1984 to 6.6 million in 2018 – a nearly 12-fold increase in 34 years. Hotel rooms and tourism jobs have increased by similar factors. The eastern tip of the island was home to only a few families in the...

In the 30 years since the fall of communism, the countries of the former Soviet bloc and Yugoslavia have undergone tremendous change. Income per capita at purchasing power parity more than tripled in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovakia. All seven...