During the presidential election of 1932 Franklin Roosevelt promised a New Deal for the American people. Our goal is to describe the changes wrought by the New Deal. To what extent did the New Deal expand existing programs? What new programs were created at all levels of government? How did the...

Double-entry bookkeeping (DEB) is used by most large firms even though scholars do not understand why they chose DEB. We address three questions about DEB’s gradual displacement of single-entry bookkeeping (SEB): (1) What is the main benefit of DEB? (2) How did DEB emerge and evolve? and (3)...

Empirical studies of antidumping activity focus almost exclusively on the period since 1980. This paper puts recent U.S. antidumping experience in historical context by studying the determinants of annual case filings over the past half century. The conventional view that few antidumping cases...

This paper investigates the pathways through which immigrant communities (social networks) influence individual naturalization. Specifically, we examine the impact that a fraction of naturalized co-ethnics, residing in the same block as a new immigrant in New York City in 1930, have on the...

Agriculture dominated the economy of eighteenth-century British America, and the pace of agricultural productivity advance was the primary determinant of the rate of economic growth. In this paper we offer new measures of agricultural productivity advance in the Lower South between 1720 and...

Wealthy philanthropic individuals operating within private law have been largely absent from the historical justice narrative of states in transition and, consequently, from normative discussion regarding the justification of their actions under the auspices of the market. This Article seeks to...

Many factors including incentive-pay, powerful shareholders, and takeover threats push for-profits managers towards maximizing shareholder value. One of the most striking factors about non-profit firms is that they have no comparable governance institutions, and the only check on managers are...

We study whether international trade fosters democracy. The likely endogeneity between democracy and trade is addressed via the gravity model of trade, allowing us to obtain a measure of natural openness. This serves as our instrumental variable for actual trade openness à la Frankel and Romer...

The American university was shaped in a formative period from 1890 to 1940 long before the rise of federal funding, the G.I. Bill, and mass higher education. Both the scale and scope of institutions of higher education were greatly increased, the research university blossomed, states vastly...

This study examines the causal joint effect of a new political regime and war against Iraq on life expectancy of Iranians for the period 1978–1988 during the revolution and war. I use a synthetic control approach to construct a synthetic Iran based on a weighted average of other Middle East...