Stationary gasoline engines began to appear on U.S. farms around 1895. Within 20 years later their numbers had exploded to one million; yet their use has received scant attention. This paper examines the demand for stationary power on the farm and compares alternative power sources in 1895. It...

We study why China suddenly exhibited a large surge in births -- a 50% increase in 2000 relative to 1999 -- in the 2000 Year of the Dragon by disaggregating birth rates at the city level. We define the dragon effect as a relative jump in birth rates compared to the trend. Prior to 2000, Asian...

This paper analyzes the economic consequences of property institutions. Federal land reform policy privatized American Indian reservation land in the 1880s. This reform intended to foster economic development on American Indian reservations by creating a system of individual private property....

According to the Austrian Business Cycle Theory, malinvestment is the key concept for understanding the transmission mechanism of the business cycle and the main determinant of its length and amplitude especially during a recession. This paper attempts to construct a malinvestment index to...

While economists generally assume that producers adopt new technology when it makes sense to do so, historians do not necessarily agree; and the views of the latter may have greater influence over popular thought. Deborah Fitzgerald, a historian of technology at MIT has argued that farmers were...

This paper analyzes the “revolving door” phenomena in the military sector in the United States. The revolving door refers to the back-and-forth movement of personnel between the government and private sector. We examine the structure of the revolving door and explain how its very nature...

Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues in The Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University in Bloomington conducted fieldwork in metropolitan police departments across the United States. Their finding in support of community policing dealt a blow to the popular belief that...

This paper examines the long run education and labor market effects from early-life exposure to the Greek 1941-42 famine. Given the short duration of the famine, we can separately identify the famine effects for cohorts exposed in utero, during infancy and at one year of age. We find that...

This is a preliminary draft of the second of what will be eight chapters in a book titled Politics as a Peculiar Business: Public Choice in a System of Entangled Political Economy. This chapter sets forth the framework to be developed and elaborated in the remaining chapters. The subtitle...

This is a preliminary draft of the first of what will be eight chapters in a book titled Politics as a Peculiar Business: Public Choice in a System of Entangled Political Economy. This chapter explores some issues regarding the scholarly location of what is often described as the Virginia...