Given the moral condemnation of ethnic conflict and the scarcity of resources and/or political will for international intervention, understanding the conditions under which ethnic conflict may resolve itself without the elimination or subjugation of an ethnic group (or groups) is important. The...

The standard political economy narrative of representative assemblies in Western Europe is one of political bargaining and credible commitments. Monarchs sought to bargain with the leading men of the realms, exchanging their commitments on various policies for revenues and other resources. This...

We develop a theory of self-enforcing monetary constitutions. A monetary constitution is the framework of rules within which money-providing and money-using agents interact. A self-enforcing monetary constitutions is upheld by the agents acting within the system; it thus does not require...

We employ data from up to 125 countries during the 1970-2009 period to explore the relationship between globalization and labor share. Existing studies report a negative relationship between trade and investment flows and labor shares. While we also find that economic flows are often negatively...

Since the 2008 financial crisis, a number of economists have suggested that central banks should follow an NGDP targeting rule. Other researchers have argued that a free and unregulated banking system stabilizes NGDP growth as an unintended consequence. We explore this argument in a simple model...

A number of political economy concerns are associated with the provision of foreign aid to developing economies. These concerns suggest that foreign aid is likely to have harmful effects on a recipient's institutional quality; also that attempts to give aid conditional on policy and...

The relative stability of aggregate labor share constitutes one of the great macroeconomic ratios. However, relative stability at the aggregate level masks the unbalanced nature of sectoral labor shares. We present a two-sector (manufacturing and services) model with induced innovation that can...

Should procedural barriers to constitutional amendment be more onerous than those to the policy changes of ordinary politics? – i.e., should constitutions be entrenched? One criterion by which to evaluate these questions is economic performance. Using data on countries worldwide and...

Why did enduring traditions of economic and political liberty arise in Western Europe? An answer to this question must be sought at the constitutional level. Within the medieval constitutional order, traditions of representative and limited government developed through patterns of constitutional...

We use US county level data (3,058 observations) from 1970 to 1998 to explore the relationship between economic growth and the extent of government employment at three levels: Federal, state and local. We find that increases in federal, state and local government employments are all negatively...