The size and strength of the Royal Navy experienced a punctuated evolution into the largest and most powerful Navy in the world by 1815.Most historians tend to represent its superiority in conflicts at sea as an indication of several factors that would be conceptualized by economists as...

As part of an endeavour to explain the divergence in incomes per capita between North and South America new institutional economics (NIE) and economic history have attempted in recent years to realize the potential effort for illumination derivable from comparisons of the heritage of their...

A key issue in the debate over gun control is how it will affectthe relative incentives of criminals and law-abiding citizens to acquireguns. We propose a simple model of interaction of criminals and law-abiding citizens as a contest where the parties arm themselves in orderto improve their...

The absence of state capacities to raise revenue and to supportmarkets is a key factor in explaining the persistence of weak states.This paper reports on an on-going project to investigate the incentiveto invest in such capacities. The paper sets out a simple analyticalstructure in which state...

[...]We conclude that technological change, combinedwith overall growth in the capital stock, is the most importantfactor driving the growing wage inequality betweenlow-skilled and high-skilled workers. Increased competitionfrom abroad, both from developing and industrializedcountries, appears...