This paper examines whether government ideology has influenced political alignment with the U.S. in voting in the UN General Assembly. I analyze a dataset of UN General Assembly voting behavior of 21 OECD countries over the 1984-2005 period employing two alternative indices of government...

Economic theory predicts that military conscription is associated with static inefficiencies as well as with dynamic distortions of the accumulation of human and physical capital. Relative to an economy with an all-volunteer force, output levels and growth rates should be lower in countries that...

Richard Musgrave was one of 200 academic economists who emigrated from Germany when Fascism came to dominate the country. This memorial lecture traces the German and European roots of Richard Musgrave’s oeuvre, trying to shed light on his family background as well as on the political and...

Recent theories of the multinational corporation introduce the property rights model of the firm and examine whether to integrate or outsource firm activities locally or to a foreign country. This paper focuses instead on the internal organization of the multinational corporation by examining...

This article develops a simple model of household decisions that explicitly accounts for the role played by the Working Families’Tax Credit (WFTC) to examine its effects on couples in Britain. The main implications of the model are tested using panel data from the British Household Panel...

Influential empirical work by Rauch and Trindade (REStat, 2002) finds that Chinese ethnic networks of the magnitude observed in Southeast Asia increase bilateral trade by at least 60%. We argue that this estimate is upward biased due to omitted variable bias. Moreover, it is partly related to a...

This paper discusses alternative ways to deal with the positive externalities of having children in a pay-as-you-go pension system. Family allowances are compared to introducing a fertility-related component into the pension formula. In an endogenous labor supply setting, both instruments are...