We examine a panel of 70 countries during 1966-2010 and utilize Reinhart and Rogoff crisis dates to estimate the effects of crises on the size and scope of government over both 5-year and 10-year horizons. We also estimate cross section regressions using 40-year (1970-2010) changes in government...

Julius Caesar and Cornelius Tacitus provide characterizations of early Germanic (barbarian) society around, respectively, 50 BC and 50 AD. The earlier date corresponds to expansion of Rome to the Rhine and Danube. During the subsequent century Germanic governance institutions changed in a number...

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...

The basic answer to the question posed by the title is: yes. We follow Ewing et al. (2006) and examine the US federal revenue-expenditure nexus in an error-correction model allowing for asymmetric adjustment. Symmetric adjustment is rejected by data from the 1959.3 to 2007.4 period. However, as...

We consider a decentralized version of the neoclassical growth model where labor share is chosen by workers to maximize their long run (permanent) wages. In this framework, if the labor share increases relative to the competitive share, workers capture a larger share of a smaller total income in...

We explore the relationship between union density and labor’s shares using panel data on 35 industries, spanning the entire US economy, for the years 1983 through 2005. For the full sample, a standard deviation increase in union density (membership or coverage rates) is associated with an...

Conventional monetary theory suggests that a closed system banking regime may lead to a systematic and uniform over-expansion of circulation. However, Selgin (2001, 2010) argues that as the number of banks increases, they act much as a “chain gang” does, making coordination all the more...

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...

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...