Constitutional political economy has focused heavily on designing constitutional rules sufficient to constrain governmental power. More attention has been devoted to designing rules that are effective constraints than on the institutions that would be required to enforce them. One problem is...

The study of entrepreneurship often focuses on the activities of the entrepreneur. While entrepreneurship is undertaken by individuals, the degree to which individuals are entrepreneurial, and the directions in which their entrepreneurial actions take, are the result of the institutional...

Economic models of democratic decision-making tend to assume that voters have preferences and politicians adjust their platforms to conform to voter preferences. However, the direction of causation (mostly) goes the other way. Political elites offer policy platforms and voters adopt the policy...

Studies of the joint time-use decisions of spouses have relied on joint estimation of time-use equations, sometimes assuming correlated errors across spouses' equations and sometimes directly examining the effects of one spouse's time use on another's, relying on panel data or instrumental...

The authors employ spatial econometrics techniques and Annual Averages data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for 1990-2004 to examine how changes in the minimum wage affect teen employment. Spatial econometrics techniques account for the fact that employment is correlated across states....

Conventional wisdom suggests that small businesses are innovative engines of Schumpetarian growth. However, as small businesses, they are likely to face credit rationing in financial markets. If true then policies that promote lending to small businesses may yield substantial economy-wide...

We develop and empirically test a model of intercollegiate athletic department expenditure decisions. The model extends general dynamic models of nonprice competition and includes the idea that nonprofit athletic departments may simply set expenditure equal to revenues. Own and rival prestige is...

Studies of the joint time-use decisions of spouses have relied on joint estimation of time-use equations, sometimes assuming correlated errors across spouses' equations and sometimes directly examining the effects of one spouse's time use on another's, relying on panel data or instrumental...

Ordinary least squares econometric approaches to estimating election vote outcomes potentially ignore spatial dependence (or autocorrelation) in the data that may affect estimates of voting behavior. The presence of spatial autocorrelation in the data can yield biased or inconsistent point...