The Cuban government often vaunts its accomplishment of a low infant mortality rate post 1959. However, because many Latin American countries experienced similar decreases, and because Cuba has historically enjoyed lower infant mortality rates than the rest of the sub-continent, it is unclear...

The Great Recession led to a large decline in economic activity throughout the entire United States with significant variation in its severity across regions. Our paper examines the role of economic freedom in explaining these differences at the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) level. We use...

Historic districts preserve the heritage of designated areas and tend to attract tourism income. However, these districts also come with specific restrictions and increased housing prices that could result in segregation. We study how two historic district programs impact residential segregation...

Tsebelis and Nardi (2016) and Tsebelis (2017) report that constitutional length correlates with lower levels of GDP per capita. They argue that this may be the case because longer constitutions lead to greater corruption. However, uncovering a causal relationship between constitutional length...

We examine whether aid affects recipient countries’ economic freedom. The existing empirical literature examining this relationship has found conflicting results. However, all of these existing studies have struggled to employ plausible identification strategies to find a causal relationship...

We employ matching methods to explore the relationships between foreign aid flows and corruption in recipient countries. Data are drawn from recipients of foreign aid for the 1996 to 2013 period. We find no compelling evidence of an effect running from corruption to aid flows. Furthermore, point...

The idea that there are gendered differences in corruption in the political arena is common. Two explanations for these differences include risk aversion and network effects. However, business leaders include a self-selected group of individuals that are comparatively risk tolerant and...

We use matching methods to explore the causal relationship between the control of corruption and press freedom from 1996-2016. We find strong evidence that corruption reform significantly increases press freedom over both the four-year and eight-year horizon. However, we find little evidence...

We use matching methods to explore the causal relationship between the control of corruption and press freedom from 1996-2016. We find strong evidence that corruption reform significantly increases press freedom over both the four-year and eight-year horizon. However, we find little evidence...