The paper inquires why in some countries traditionally ruled by absolute monarchs the monarchy survived in the form of constitutional monarchy but not in others. It considers constitutional monarchy as a negotiated settlement between the king and a liberal opposition to share office rents, while...

This paper describes the compilation of an annual database on public expenditure on education, health and social security and other fiscal variables. It covers 32 upper and upper-middle income countries, between 1950 and 2008. The total includes 8 Latin American countries. The database was...

This paper uses a linguistic tree, describing the genealogical relationship between all 6912 world languages, to compute measures of diversity at different levels of linguistic aggregation. By doing so, we let the data inform us on which linguistic cleavages are most relevant for a range of...

This paper proposes a new method to measure ethnolinguistic diversity and offers new results linking such diversity with a range of political economy outcomes -- civil conflict, redistribution, economic growth and the provision of public goods. We use linguistic trees, describing the...

The United States today, according to most studies, is among the least corrupt nations in the world. But America's past was checkered with political scandal and widespread corruption that would not seem unusual compared with the most corrupt developing nation today. We construct a "corruption...

In 1841 and 1842, eight states and the Territory of Florida defaulted on their sovereign debts. Traditional histories of the default crisis have stressed the causal role of the depression that began with the Panic of 1837, unexpected revenue shortfalls from canal and bank investments as a result...

The paper examines the questions of how nonterritorial feudal governments in medieval central Europe emerged and what their tasks were, of how competition between these governments functioned, and of what consequences it had. The analysis leads to three hypotheses: (1) governmental...

The American social welfare system was transformed during the 1930s. Prior to the New Deal public relief was administered almost exclusively by local governments. The administration of local public relief was widely thought to be corrupt. Beginning in 1933, federal, state, and local governments...

Why did states dominate investments in economic development in early America? Between 1787 and 1860, the national government%u2019s $54 million on promoting transportation infrastructure while the states spent $450 million. Using models of legislative choice, we show that Congress could not...

A free and informative press is widely agreed to be crucial to the democratic process today. But throughout much of the nineteenth century U.S. newspapers were often public relations tools funded by politicians, and newspaper independence was a rarity. The newspaper industry underwent...