We examine the empirical relationship between the institutions of economic freedom and labor shares in a panel up to 93 countries covering 1970 through 2009. We find that a standard deviation increase in the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) score is associated about 1/3...

This paper presents microeconomic evidence on US pricing dynamics immediately pre- and post-establishment of the Bretton Woods monetary regime. We track prices of 49 goods (1172 observations) in the 1938 through 1951 Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogs. Over the full time period the average length...

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...

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...