Economic freedom is robustly associated with income growth, but does this association extend to the poorest in a society? In this paper, we employ Canada’s longitudinal cohorts of income mobility between 1982 and 2018 to answer this question. We find that economic freedom, as measured by the...

Outside of economics (and even within), Julian Simon is mostly remembered for his famous bet on resource prices against biologist Paul Ehrlich. The bet is frequently used to illustrate how some environmental scares are exaggerated. In the rare instances when more details are added, the emphasis...

To what extent are the outcomes of economic regulation intended and desired by its proponents? To address this question, we combine Stigler’s theory of regulatory capture with the Austrian theory of the dynamics of interventionism. We reframe Stigler’s theory of regulatory capture as an...

The British Conquest of Quebec in 1760 was a key moment in Canadian history as it marked the beginning of a tense coexistence between French and English Canadians. Many argue that the Conquest had strong economic consequences in the form of the relative poverty of the French settlers. The...

Buchanan and Wagner (1977) pointed to an asymmetry in the political rewards of deficits and surpluses with the former being preferable to the latter. We test this claim by relying on the historical reputation surveys of American presidents. Historical reputations have long been something...

From the 19th century to the 1940's, Quebec remained poorer and less economically developed than the rest of Canada in general and poorer than Ontario in particular. This placed Quebec at the bottom of North American rankings of living standards. One prominent hypothesis for the initiation of...

After the Civil War, the Democratic party carried an important electoral penalty from being associated with the war. To deal with this penalty, the party took increasingly anti-immigration positions to compete with Republicans. This led some Republican strongholds such as California to become...

Lighthouses are the quintessential public goods and thus constitute a key illustration of market failure in need of government remedy. Considerable debates have been waged over whether optimal private provision was historically possible. However, little to no attention has been devoted to how...

Did late Imperial Russia suffer from Malthusian pressures? In this paper, we use quarterly demographic and economic data from Moscow to answer this question using a VAR approach. In doing so, we provide the first application of this common methodology in economic history to pre-1913 Russia. We...

A long-standing item of interest in Canadian economic history is the “agricultural crisis” that apparently plagued the large colony of Quebec during the first half of the nineteenth century. One particularly resilient explanation of the crisis claims that cultural conservatism made the...