How can public policy best deal with infectious disease? In answering this question, scholarship on the optimal control of infectious disease adopts the model of a benevolent social planner who maximizes social welfare. This approach, which treats the social health planner as a unitary “public...

The Black Death was the largest demographic shock in European history. We review the evidence for the origins, spread, and mortality of the disease. We document that it was a plausibly exogenous shock to the European economy and trace out its aggregate and local impacts in both the short-run and...

Public health is an oft-used illustration of market failure and of the necessity of governmental action to overcome such failure. Covid-19 is just the latest in a continuing series of claims of market failure that are alleged to require solution by politically selected experts. Without doubt,...

The COVID-19 outbreak prompted governments around the world to employ a range of emergency methods to combat the pandemic. In many countries these emergency measures relied heavily on police powers, which refer to the capacity of governments to forcefully regulate behavior and impose order as...

While few economists dispute that governments should have some role in dealing with pandemics, the relevant institutional question is whether governments can deal with pandemics. In this article, we argue that there are trade-offs embedded with the provision of public health measures. States...

This paper explores the institutional determinants of persecution by studying the intensity of the Black Death pogroms in the Holy Roman Empire. Political fragmentation exacerbated rent-seeking in the Holy Roman Empire. We argue that this fragmentation led to Jewish communities facing more...

This essay uses the analytical lens crafted through the vision of entangled political economy to explore the ways in which concerns over Covid-19 have influenced conduct within the public square of social life. By entangled political economy we refer to a scheme of thought articulated by two...

Entrepreneurship is the economic source of change in society. While it is ubiquitous, its particular qualities depend on the system of political economy in which it operates. We distinguish between two systems of democratic political economy. One system is the classically liberal system where...

The Keynesian revolution rationalized a divergence between political and economic rationality. Prior to the Keynesian revolution, divergences between political and commercial practice were held in check by moral beliefs to the effect that good conduct for governments was similar to good conduct...