We evaluate the role of taxes on trade in the development of imperial Britain's fiscal-military state. Influential work, e.g., Brewer's (1989) "Sinews of Power," attributed increased fiscal capacity to the taxation of domestic, rather than traded, goods: excise revenues, coarsely associated with...

Every month, a fraction of UK property leases are extended for another 90 years or more. We use new data on thousands of these natural experiments from 2003 onwards to estimate the "natural rate of return on capital", \(r_K^\text{*}\), which also represents the long-run dividend-price ratio....

Newborn health is an important component in the chain of intergenerational transmission of disadvantage. This paper contributes to the literature on the determinants of health at birth in two ways. First, we analyze the role of maternal endowments and investments (education and smoking in...

What drives change in a society's values? From Marx to modernization theory, scholars have identified a connection between structural transformation and social change. To understand how changes in a society's dominant mode of production affect its dominant values, we examine the case of the...

We study cointegrating relationships among fiscal variables and output and use them to introduce a new measure of the government's fiscal position. In the US since World War II, we find that the primary surplus-GDP ratio and the government debt-GDP ratio are nonstationary, which invalidates...