In The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Benjamin Friedman argues that growth reduces the strength of interpersonal income comparisons, and thereby tends to increases the desire for pro-social legislation, a position he supports by drawing on the historical records of the US and several...

We estimate the impact of increases in Federal student aid and funding, such as the recently proposed American Graduation Initiative (AGI), on the outcomes of community colleges, including enrollments, list and average tuitions, and variables related to educational quality. We develop a model of...

We extend the empirical literature on the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) by showing the legal origin matters for the evolution of environmental quality. Using observations of ambient sulfur dioxide levels, we find that the EKC for French and British legal origin countries diverge as incomes...

We develop a Schumpeterian growth model with private IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) enforcement and investigate the implications for IPR and R&D policies. In our setting, successful innovators undertake costly activities to enforce their patents and protect their monopoly rents. These Rent...

This paper estimates the effect of individual responsibility on economic development using an instrument derived from rainfall data. I argue that a taste for collective responsibility was adaptive in preindustrial societies that were exposed to high levels of agricultural risk, and that these...

This note presents a simple model of Hirschman and Rothschild’s (1973) tunnel effect, which is generally interpreted as reducing inequality aversion. The model identifies two separate tunnel effects, associated with own-sector and inter-sector productivity shocks, that are closely related to...