We analyze the conditions under which a country’s social structure facilitates or impedes the state’s mobilization of financial resources during civil conflict. Our argument emphasizes the ways in which the central state can divide and conquer social groups in order to empower the state....

We consider the distribution of economic activity within a country in light of three leading theories - increasing returns, random growth, and locational fundamentals. To do so, we examine the distribution of regional population in Japan from the Stone Age to the modern era. We also consider the...

Introduction. During the years of Ukrainian independence, China has risen from a relatively insignificant country in Asia to the biggest trade partner of Ukraine surpassing even Russia and other post-Soviet republics both in amount and the importance of bilateral trade. To fully understand the...

Most labor scarce overseas countries moved decisively to restrict their immigration during the first third of the 20th century. This autarchic retreat from unrestricted and even publicly-subsidized immigration in the first global century before World War I to the quotas and bans introduced...

The Spanish colonial empire initially faced a trilemma in the New World. First, they needed to incentivize quasi-private Spanish expeditions to subdue, settle, and secure new territories. Second, they needed labor to develop the new territories and provide a stream of rents for the imperial...

Why did states dominate investments in economic development in early America? Between 1787 and 1860, the national government%u2019s $54 million on promoting transportation infrastructure while the states spent $450 million. Using models of legislative choice, we show that Congress could not...

Lack of evidence has been the major obstacle to understanding trends and differences in human welfare over the millennia. This paper explains and applies methods that are obscure to most academics and essentially unknown to the general public. A millennial perspective is best obtained from...

Innovation policy can be a crucial component of governments' responses to crises. Because speed is a paramount objective, crisis innovation may also require different policy tools than innovation policy in non-crisis times, raising distinct questions and tradeoffs. In this paper, we survey the...

World War II was one of the most acute emergencies in U.S. history, and the first where the mobilization of science and technology was a major part of the government response. The U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) led a major research effort to develop technologies and...

The cultural turn in copyright law identified authorship as a rhetorical construct employed by economic interests as a mechanism to establish claims to property rights. Grassroots intellectual property political movements have been seen as both a means of countering these interests’...