This paper analyzes how self-interest and long-term profit expectations provided the necessary incentives for the adult film industry to self-regulate and to find mechanisms to minimize the risks of HIV outbreaks that could result from the asymmetric information and network effects that...

Since Baumol (1990), the economic literature distinguishes between two broad categories of entrepreneurship: productive and unproductive entrepreneurship. This paper attempts to introduce a third category: indirectly (un)productive entrepreneurship. We argue that profit seeking entrepreneurs...

We argue that the canonical reading of Hayek often falls short of the implications of Hayek's insights. We present Hayek's "knowledge problem" (how order in a society is possible without the required knowledge for that order being possessed by any particular individual), and we discuss some of...

Concerns about the institutional impact of immigration, particularly, in the United States, are not new. We can trace them all the way back to Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. More recently, in response to a literature that questions the efficiency of current immigration restrictions,...

This paper studies the relationship between mass immigration in Argentina and the rise of Juan D. Perón (the iconic Argentine populist leader) in the mid-20th century. We find no evidence suggesting that mass immigration to Argentina from 1876 through 1925 explains Peronism directly or...

Concerns about immigration and its impact on the institutions of the countries that welcome immigrants are not new. In the United States, we find such concerns in the correspondences and writings of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. Recently, in response to a...

This paper examines whether the institutional quality of immigrants' origin countries matters when testing the relationship between immigration and the US states' economic freedom scores. Our results show that, in the short run, the relationship between economic freedom and immigrants from...

This paper studies the impact of 21st century populism in Latin America on income and human development. We find a significant economic cost of populism that is consistent with other studies using a different methodology than ours. Our sample consists of five Latin American countries...

This paper builds a populism index to study to impact of commodity prices and economic crisis on Latin American populism in the early 21st century. Panel data analysis shows some evidence that both, commodity prices and economic crisis, are correlated with an increase in populist policies