Measures of bilateral political relations are typically long-memory (fractionally integrated) processes. Appropriate inference and interpretation of this property hinges on the underlying reasons behind it. There are three possible explanations: (i) mechanical aggregation, (ii) bilateral...

For the Dominican Republic, as for many Caribbean islands, sugar once defined the export sector. But times have changed, and the history of exports is less dominated by sugar in the Dominican Republic than in most Caribbean islands. In more recent history, agricultural exports have diversified...

What institutional features encourage community policing? Many police departments across the US have attempted to implement a community-oriented policing philosophy. The stated goals are to build greater trust between the police and the community, maintain order and quality of life, and solve...

The Dominican Republic is the most popular tourist destination in the Caribbean islands, by a comfortable margin. More tourists visited the Dominican Republic in 2017 than Jamaica and Puerto Rico combined. Cuba, arguably the most exotic destination in the Caribbean these days, and the largest of...

This paper looks to explore the effects of James Buchanan's book Cost and Choice since its publication. I discuss how Cost and Choice has had a limited impact on the treatment of welfare economics within Law & Economics. I then elaborate on Buchanan's discussion to highlight other issues within...

Orthodox economics models defense as a public good provided by a central nation state. This approach abstracts away from the diverse institutions and processes individuals use to provide defense in the actual world. This paper frames defense as a polycentric system whereby dispersed groups of...

Many economies exhibit downward wage rigidity. Surveys of managers indicate that employers hold wages rigid because they believe morale will suffer after a wage cut. Otherwise, there is little evidence for how employers' beliefs contribute to wage rigidity and whether those beliefs are accurate....

Recently, many have predicted an imminent automation revolution, and large resulting job losses. Others have created metrics to predict new patterns in job automation vulnerability. As context to such claims, we test basic theory, two vulnerability metrics, and 251 O*NET job features as...

Frank Knight famously remarked nearly a century ago that the primary problems that stem from societal living together do not arise because of what we don’t know but rather arise because of what we know that isn’t true. This paper pursues Knight’s theme by incorporating three elements into...

This paper reconceptualizes and unbundles the relationship between public predation, state capacity, and economic development from a constitutional perspective. By reframing our understanding of state capacity theory from a constitutional perspective, we argue that to the extent there is a...