This paper assesses how to quantitatively classify countries as conforming to the ideal of an “open access order” in the spirit of Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry Weingast’s Violence and Social Orders. It does so by taking the harmonic mean of already existing measures of...

We apply System GMM and Panel Vector Autoregression (PVAR) to investigate the long run relationships between output, human capital, liberalized political institutions, and liberalized economic institutions. We find consistent evidence that economic institutions and human capital both greatly...

I use matched county pairs on either side of US state borders to investigate the causal effects of the Economic Freedom of North America index (EFNA) on local outcomes. This method is similar to Dube et al. (2010). I construct a panel of county pairs running from 1981-2012 and four measures of...