Are smarter machines our children's friends? Or can they bring about a transfer from our relatively unskilled children to ourselves that leaves our children and, indeed, all our descendants - worse off? This, indeed, is the dire message of the model presented here in which smart machines...

The monetary powers embedded in the U.S. Constitution were revolutionary and led to a watershed transformation in the nation's monetary structure. They included determining what monies could be legal tender, who could emit fiat paper money, and who could incorporate banks. How the debate at the...

While much research in political economy points out the benefits of "limited government," political scientists have long emphasized the problems created in many less developed nations by "weak states," which lack the power to tax and regulate the economy and to withstand the political and social...

Education and health care are the two largest government expenditure items in the United States. The public sector directly provides the majority of educational services, through the public school bureaucracy, while most public support for health care is channelled through a system of...

Economists generally assume the existence of sufficient institutions to sustain a market economy and tax the citizens. However, this starting point cannot easily be taken for granted in many states, neither in history nor in the developing world of today. This paper develops a framework where...

This article examines the economic basis for what is termed %u201Crational discounting,%u201D which entails full recognition of policy effects over time and exponential discounting at a riskless rate of return. Policies often cannot be ranked unambiguously in terms of their present or future...

This paper has three goals. The first (and perhaps the most important one) is to provide a new compilation of data on ethnic, linguistic and religious composition at the sub-national level for a large number of countries. This data set allows us to measure segregation of different ethnic,...

Using data on trust and trustworthiness from the 1990 wave of the World Values Survey, I first investigate a model of the extent of tax cheating and the size of government that recognizes the interdependence of the two. The results reveal that tax cheating is lower in countries that exhibit more...

This paper studies the international experience with securities transaction taxes (STTs), using the Swedish and British systems as case studies. We argue that STTs are best thought of as taxes on different resources used in transactions: domestic brokerage services in the case of Sweden, and...

In this paper we present a comprehensive comparison of IPO placement methods in over 50 countries. We find that out of the three primary methods, fixed price public offers, auctions, and book building, auctions are least popular with issuers. Since auctions allow for price discovery while...