This paper explores the effects of fiscal capacity on the rule of law. Following the Besley and Persson (2009) model exploring complementarities between fiscal capacity and legal capacity, we test the relationship using fiscal capacity and rule of law data from the Varieties of Democracy...

Competition is widely seen as a driver of improvements in institutional quality. We consider the robustness of competition, namely, polycentricity, in the form of the creation of institutions built by rebel groups in the course of civil war. In a variety of panel regressions and synthetic...

Macroeconomists have applied many versions of vector autoregression to measuring the size of the government spending multiplier. Very frequently in the literature on that multiplier, the statistical significance of results is held to an unconventionally low standard of one standard error. This...

Cowen (2020) argues for a redirection of effort towards “State Capacity Libertarianism,” which keeps the core of policy proposals from libertarianism intact while emphasizing a select set of policies aimed at furthering economic growth. These policies center on the ability of the state to...

There is a large and growing economics literature that seeks to explain how modern economic development and cross-country income differentials are the result of ancient historic, cultural, genetic, or other factors, whose effects persist in the modern world (Spolaore and Wacziarg 2013). Referred...