The Great Recession led to a large decline in economic activity throughout the entire United States with significant variation in its severity across regions. Our paper examines the role of economic freedom in explaining these differences at the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) level. We use...

Economic freedom is often defined as a negative liberty – freedom from interference. This contrasts with positive liberty which is defined as freedom to do which refers to capacities. A well-established literature argues that income inequality reduces positive liberty by limiting the...

A growing literature seeks to identify the determinants of economic freedom. Within that literature, very few studies have focused on constitutional design. We study the entrenchment of constitutional provisions, i.e., the extent to which they are more difficult (costly) to change than...

This paper contributes to the literature that uses the Economic Freedom of North America (EFNA) index to evaluate relationships with various outcomes. Most of the literature estimates a linear relationship between economic freedom and those outcomes. However, using matching methods can be a...

Using World Bank estimates of intergenerational educational persistence and mobility for multiple across the development spectrum, this paper finds that economic freedom noticeably improves educational mobility. This is probably because economic freedom increases the returns to education in ways...