We analyze the effect of the inherited Mexican property institutions in California on the state’s early agricultural development, focusing on land demarcation and the implied water rights. In California large tracts of land, called ranchos, granted during Spanish and Mexican rule of California...

This paper combines the property rights approach of Barzel with models from renewable resource and evolutionary economics to examine the domestication of wild animals. Wild animals are governed by weak property rights to stocks and individuals while domesticated animals are governed by private...

The managerial quality hypothesis suggests managers/leaders' quality (e.g., experience) contributes to performance. However, this proposition assumes all types of experience contribute equally to all spectra of policies. This oversimplification may explain the inconsistency in the leaders'...

Do political hawks prioritize different policies than technocrats? We address this question by building on the task-specific human capital framework, implementation literature, and politicization theory. We argue that skills accumulated in politicized posts differ from those accrued in...

We explore the long run impact of the Spanish missions on Native American outcomes in the early 20th century. Native communities who interacted with Spanish missionaries developed into enclaves which blended Catholicism with native culture, and some survived assaults on their property rights by...

This paper examines the effect of restricting opioid prescription on homelessness. We assess this relationship by exploiting plausible exogenous variation in prescribed opioid supply derived from an opioid restriction policy: the hydrocodone rescheduling. We identified the causal effect of this...

People who experience homelessness often migrate to new places, seeking more stable access to food, shelter, income, and services. Under the Affordable Care Act, 36 states expanded Medicaid, a means-tested program that increased states’ capacity to provide and administer health care and social...

This paper develops a semiotic-inferential model of verbal communication for incomplete information games: a language is seen as a set of conventional signs that point to types, and the credibility of a message depends on the strategic context. Formally, there is an encoding-decoding step where...