Building on the view that financial systems from contract and trading structures through regulation are artifacts of law and politics, this paper analyzes the fundamental reasons for the observed hierarchy in all financial systems. Why are financial systems hierarchical? The answer offered here...

Our paper provides a comparative perspective on the development of public primary education in four of the largest developing economies circa 1910: Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC). These four countries encompassed more than 50% of the world's population in 1910, but remarkably few of...

Contribution to the panel session at the Hoover Institution conference on “Frameworks for Monetary Policy for the Next Century,” May 30, 2014.

This paper derives original series of average years of schooling in the United States 1870–1930, which take into account the impact of mass migrations on the US educational level. We reconstruct the foreign-born US population by age and by country of origin, while combining data on the flow of...