Conventional wisdom suggests that small businesses are innovative engines of Schumpetarian growth. However, as small businesses, they are likely to face credit rationing in financial markets. If true then policies that promote lending to small businesses may yield substantial economy-wide...

Conventional monetary theory suggests that a closed system banking regime may lead to in-concert overexpansions of circulation by its banks. However, Selgin (2001, 2010) argues that this is unlikely as long as there are enough banks to ensure (i) routine interbank settlement and (ii) no...

We examine the empirical relationship between the institutions of economic freedom and labor shares in a panel of 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 with about...

Using a panel of up to 116 countries from 1970 to 2010 we estimate the effects of foreign aid flows on a variety of measures of institutional quality. We find that aid flows are associated with the deterioration of both political and economic institutions. Regarding the latter, aid flows are...

In this paper we model the migration decisions of high-skilled women as a function of the benefits associated with moving from an origin with relatively low women´s rights to a destination with a relatively high women´s rights. However, the costs faced by women are decreasing in the level...

We use the Stansel (2013) metropolitan area economic freedom index and 25 conditioning variables to analyze the spatial relationships between institutional quality and economic outcomes across 381 U.S. metropolitan areas. Specifically, we allow for spatial dependence in both the dependent and...

Evidence of relationships between religious affiliation and the African AIDS pandemic is found in the medical, religion, and sociology literatures. In particular, studies have shown that predominantly Christian countries tend to have higher HIV rates than predominantly Muslim countries. These...

The relative stability of aggregate labor's share constitutes one of the great macroeconomic ratios. However, changes in individual industry labor's shares are essentially statistically independent of one another, and the average values of industry labor's shares vary widely. We present a...