Between 1839 and 1842 the United States suffered through an acute debt crisis. Over this period eight states and one territory defaulted, five of which outright repudiated all or parts of their debts outstanding. However, for many of those same states reentry into capital markets occurred...

James Buchanan was a fervent advocate of a non-discriminatory politics. However, he. translated his views on constitutional political economy into (de jure) constitutional design in an insufficiently thoughtful way. Simply writing non-discriminatory politics into a Constitution is unlikely to...

In the eighth century, Charles Martel confiscated Church property to make distributions of benefices and precaria to his vassals. This project was an investment in state capacity and secularizations of Church property were continued under Charles' son Pippin III. Many scholars have characterized...

Successful constitutionalism is characterized by de jure Constitutional provisions de facto binding political agents. A growing literature seeks to quantify cross-country variation in Constitutional compliance and explore its determinants (e.g., Law & Versteeg 2013; Gutmann et al. 2022; Voigt 2021). We...

Tsebelis and Nardi (2016) and Tsebelis (2017) report that constitutional length correlates with lower levels of GDP per capita. They argue that this may be the case because longer constitutions lead to greater corruption. However, uncovering a causal relationship between constitutional length...