In the past few years, scholars in Political Science and American Indian Studies have identified a change in the relationship between Indian nations, the United States Government and state governments across the country. This important, and expanding, relationship in public policy making focuses...

In this paper, we model lobbying and the initiative process as a one-shot game between groups of citizens and the legislature. We model voters as random utility maximizers, as in McKelvey and Patty (2000). Our solution concept is Bayes equilibrium in weakly undominated strategies. Modeling the...

In this paper we consider a model of lobbying in which an interest group can lobby either the bureaucracy or the Congress for their preferred policy. The implications of the choice by a lobbyist of whom to lobby (the agency or the legislature) are explored. The main findings of the paper are...

Bimetallism disappeared as a monetary regime in the 1870s. Flandreau (1996) clearly demonstrates that French bimetallism would have been able to withstand the German de-monetization of silver. Could it have withstood if many other countries in the world moved to the gold standard following in...

The classical gold standard period, 1880-1913, witnessed deep economic integration. High capital imports were related to better growth performance but may also have created greater volatility via financial crises. I first document the substantial output losses from various types of crises. I...

The classical gold standard only gradually became an international monetary regime after 1870. This paper provides a cross-country analysis of why countries adopted when they did. I use duration analysis to show that network externalities operating through trade channels help explain the pattern...

What has driven trade booms and trade busts in the past and present? We derive a micro-founded measure of trade frictions from leading trade theories and use it to gauge the importance of bilateral trade costs in determining international trade flows. We construct a new balanced sample of...

What has driven trade booms and trade busts in the past century and a half? Was it changes in global output or in the costs of international trade? To address this question, we derive a micro-founded measure of aggregate bilateral trade costs based on a standard model of trade in differentiated...