We conduct a laboratory experiment to examine the performance of a market for protection. As the central feature of our treatment comparisons, we vary the access that “peasants” have to violence-empowered “elites”. The focus of the experiment is to observe how elites enforce and operate...

In this paper, a new approach to disclose the impact of politics on economic growth is presented: data derived from content analysis of party manifestos is used as measures of party preferences. In a panel of 23 OECD countries, a positive impact of party support for various market-liberal...

The 'big trade-off', described by Arthur Okun some thirty years ago, is back again. Equality or efficiency, or to put it differently again: modern highly developed economies and societies must choose between the Scylla of income inequality or the Charybdis of unemployment. Furthermore, it seems...

Literature on the international financial architecture suggests that financial crises have had profound effects on both the balance of power in the establishment of financial regulation, and the economic impact of regulation on countries and regulated entities. In this article, we seek to add to...

RESUMENLos antecedentes del modelo de economía política neoliberal en Colombia permiten analizar, objetivamente, su impacto sobre el desarrollo y la trasformación de los derechos económicos, sociales y culturales de los colombianos en las dos últimas décadas. Al final de las cuales se...

If property rights in land are so beneficial, why are they not adopted more widely? I propose a theory based on the idea that limited property rights over peasants' plots may be supported by elite landowners (who depend on peasants for labour) to achieve two goals. First, like other distortions...

Can infrastructure investment win "hearts and minds"? We analyze a famous case in the early stages of dictatorship - the building of the motorway network in Nazi Germany. The Autobahn was one of the most important projects of the Hitler government. It was intended to reduce unemployment, and was...

We show that the annual excess return of the S&P 500 is almost 10 percent higher during the last two years of the presidential cycle than during the first two years. This pattern cannot be explained by business-cycle variables capturing time-varying risk premia, differences in risk levels, or by...

Each democratic nation with the Montesquieu Trias Politica separation of powers of the Executive, Legislative and Judiciary branches of government is advised to create an Economic Supreme Court as a fourth branch. The new UK Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) falls short of that and will...

We study the dynamic taxation of capital and labor in the Ramsey model under the assumption that taxes and public good provision are decided by a self-interested politician who cannot commit to policies. We show that, as long as the politician is as patient as the citizens, the Chamley–Judd...