One of the few constants since the United States declared its independence is the presence of frequent financial crises with similar causes. In the nineteenth century, these panics were frequent with eight occurring over the century. However, following the Second World War there was a period of...

Beginning in the 1880s, southern states introduced pensions for Confederate veterans and widows. They continued to expand these programs through the 1920s, while states outside the region were introducing cash transfer programs for workers, poor mothers, and the elderly. Using legislative...

Glasmeier A. and Wood L. (2005) Analysis of US economic development administration expenditure patterns over 30 years, Regional Studies 39 , 1261-1274. Many of the classic regional development programmes have been criticized for being ineffective and failing to meet their intended goals. A fact...

Can part of Africa's current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa's slave trades....

We study whether international trade fosters democracy. The likely endogeneity between democracy and trade is addressed via the gravity model of trade, allowing us to obtain a measure of natural openness. This serves as our instrumental variable for actual trade openness à la Frankel and Romer...

Gary R Saxonhouse was one of the leading world scholars on Japanese economy. Born in New York City in 1943, he attended Yale University, where he received his PhD in Economics in 1971. He joined the Faculty of Economics at the University of Michigan beginning in 1970, where he taught throughout...

State failure is more common than generally assumed and often has distinctly negative consequences that may manifest themselves in neighboring countries. For this reason, it has attracted considerable attention in academic and policy circles alike. The researchers exploring the phenomenon have...

I analyze individual attitudes towards trade and immigration in comparative terms. I find that individuals are on average more pro-trade than pro-immigration across several countries. I identify a key source of this difference: the cleavage in trade preferences, absent in immigration attitudes,...

This paper analyzes welfare-state determinants of individual attitudes towards immigrants - within and across countries - and their interaction with labor-market drivers of preferences. We consider two different mechanisms through which a redistributive welfare system might adjust as a result of...