The CIA intervened regularly in Latin America politics during the Cold War, in some cases going asfar as bringing about regime change. While these interventions may have been considered successful from the US perspective, it is less clear what the economic and political consequences were for the...

Governments of rich nations tend to have high fiscal capacity while being credibly limited in their use of revenues (Johnson and Koyama 2017). This poses a puzzle. A government powerful enough to effectively enforce property rights under the rule of law is also powerful enough to prey upon the...

The CIA intervened regularly in Latin America politics during the Cold War, in some cases going as far as bringing about regime change. We study the economic, political, and civil society effects of CIA-sponsored regime change in five Latin American countries and find that these actions caused...

In this article, I investigate why it was so difficult for nineteenth-century Mexico to develop the institutions necessary for a modern state. Driven by regional warlords and bandits, the country suffered from persistent violence and disorder. Challenging geography and colonial legacies...

In this paper, a simultaneous model of the evolution of human and physical capital in Sub-Saharan Africa is estimated. It can be shown that the two types of capital are jointly endogenous, in that increases in human capital significantly raise the per-worker physical capital stock, and increases...

The author studies East Asian economic performance relative to the experience of a sample of rich, industrialized countries. On combining the coefficients from an augmented Solow model of growth for a sample of industrialized countries with the actual levels of factor accumulation in East Asia,...

We depart from the trade and wages literature and its emphasis on North-South trade, examining North-North by developing the basic linkages between trade-based integration and relative wages in an Ethier-type division of labor model. Using this model we identify a formal relationship between...

We depart from the trade and wages literature and its emphasis on North-South trade, examining North-North by developing the basic linkages between trade-based integration and relative wages in an Ethier-type division of labor model. Using this model we identify a formal relationship between...

Visible expenditures which convey higher socioeconomic status may help individuals differentiate themselves in the marriage market when there is competition for partners and imperfect information. We examine a unique dataset of automobile purchasers in China to investigate the extent to which...