How important was coal to the Industrial Revolution? Despite the huge growth of output, and the grip of coal and steam on the popular image of the Industrial Revolution, recent cliometric accounts have assumed coal mining mattered little to the Industrial Revolution. In contrast both E. A....

Did the gold standard diminish macroeconomic volatility? Supporters thought so, critics thought not, and theory offers ambiguous messages. Hard regimes like the gold standard limit monetary shocks by tying policymakers' hands; but exchange-rate inflexibility compromises shock absorption in a...

Did adoption of the gold standard exacerbate or diminish macroeconomic volatility? Supporters thought so, critics thought not, and theory offers ambiguous messages. A hard exchange-rate regime such as the gold standard might limit monetary shocks if it ties the hands of policy makers. But any...

Long-run cross-country price data exhibit a puzzle. Today, richer countries exhibit higher price levels than poorer countries, a stylized fact usually attributed to the Balassa- Samuelson effect. But looking back fifty years, this effect virtually disappears from the data. What is often assumed...

Conventional wisdom in economic history suggests that conflict between countries can be enormously disruptive of economic activity, especially international trade. Yet nothing is known empirically about these effects in large samples. We study the effects of war on bilateral trade for almost all...

Originally propounded by the sixteenth-century scholars of the University of Salamanca, the conceptof purchasing power parity (PPP) was revived in the interwar period in the context of the debateconcerning the appropriate level at which to re-establish international exchange rate...

The logical foundations of game-theoretic solution concepts have so far been developed within the confines of epistemic logic. In this paper we turn to a different branch of modal logic, namely temporal logic, and propose to view the solution of a game as a complete prediction about future play....

The Downsian model, in which candidates care only about winning elections and parties play no role, has been hegemonic in formal political theory for forty years. In the past fifteen years, various authors have worked with a model of electoral competition in which competing parties represent...

Consider electoral competition between two candidates, in which there is a single-dimensional issue space. The simplest way to get the result that, in Nash equilibrium, candidates propose different policies, is to assume that (1) candidates are uncertain about the distribution of voter...

Under dictatorship, trade unions and strikes are illegal, and so wages are low and employment is full. Under democracy, there are two institutional innovations: trade unions, which can keep the wage about the Walrasian level, and the citizen franchise, by which citizens may vote transfer...