In this article, I investigate why it was so difficult for nineteenth-century Mexico to develop the institutions necessary for a modern state. Driven by regional warlords and bandits, the country suffered from persistent violence and disorder. Challenging geography and colonial legacies...

We depart from the trade and wages literature and its emphasis on North-South trade, examining North-North by developing the basic linkages between trade-based integration and relative wages in an Ethier-type division of labor model. Using this model we identify a formal relationship between...

Corruption is often cited as a fundamental obstacle to economic development, making anticorruption initiatives an important policy objective. However, there is little convincing empiricalevidence concerning the benefits of anti-corruption reform. We fill this gap by identifying a set ofcountries...

The CIA intervened regularly in Latin America politics during the Cold War, in some cases going asfar as bringing about regime change. While these interventions may have been considered successful from the US perspective, it is less clear what the economic and political consequences were for the...

We examine the effect of different exchange rate regimes on the economic behavior of 16 developing countries during 1997. While current account deficits predict well the subsequent degree of currency depreciation, holding constant the deficit, the exchange rate regime in place at the beginning...

Governments of rich nations tend to have high fiscal capacity while being credibly limited in their use of revenues (Johnson and Koyama 2017). This poses a puzzle. A government powerful enough to effectively enforce property rights under the rule of law is also powerful enough to prey upon the...

The US sugar program has long delivered significant subsidies to a concentrated group of sugar growers at the expense of American consumers. In 2013, however, an amendment in the House of Representatives attempted to seriously reduce those subsidies. The amendment narrowly lost. A similar...

The CIA intervened regularly in Latin America politics during the Cold War, in some cases going as far as bringing about regime change. We study the economic, political, and civil society effects of CIA-sponsored regime change in five Latin American countries and find that these actions caused...

I examine 19th century Mexico for a better understanding of how and why it was so difficult to create the institutions of a modern state. I show that Mexico suffered from a vicious cycle in that period, something that is probably common to many developing countries, in that they needed a large...