Alan Krueger (1999) provides a measure of "raw" labor's share for the US postwar economy based on Mincerian regressions using Census data on individual earnings, schooling, and work experience. He finds that raw labor's share fell by over 8 percent from 1959 through 1996 to under 5 percent of...

The U.S. federal government responded to the financial crisis and recession that began in 2007-08 with unprecedented fiscal stimulus. Passed in February of 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) came with a price tag of $831 billion. Yet the economy has not returned to a path of...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government-sponsored entities (GSEs) designed to facilitate a secondary market for mortgages. A secondary market makes mortgages more liquid, increasing the available pool of funds for mortgages and the willingness of originators to initiate loans. Since the supply...

Constitutional scholars emphasize the importance of an enduring, stable constitutional order. North and Weingast (1989) argue that it consistent with credible commitments to sustainable fiscal policies. However, this view is controversial and has received little empirical study. We use...

We offer evidence of the role of continental orientation in the historical diffusion of technologies. Diamond (1997) argued that technologies spread more slowly North-South (N-S) than East-West (E-W) for two reasons. First, it was relatively costly for individuals to transport innovations when...

The income convergence literature suggests that poor countries can catch-up to rich ones conditional on sharing certain characteristics with rich countries. Good institutions such as strong property rights and rule-of-law are key amongst those characteristics. From a policy perspective this is...

We examine the empirical relationship between Internet subscriptions and foreign aid flows for 22 Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members for a 15 year time period employing the median voter model. We find that Internet use is positively related to the amount of foreign aid that donor...

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...