The state is conceptually distinct from both economy and society, with inherent interests in expanding its scope for autonomous action, asserting control over economic and social interactions, and structuring economic and social relations. These interests derive primarily from the state’s...

This paper analyzes whether political outcomes in local democracies are determinedby the preferences of the median -typically poor- agents or whether they reflect thewishes of the wealthy elites. A model shows that when politicians belonging to differentgroups can form coalitions, the wealthy...

One of the key goals of political economy is to understand how in-stitutional arrangements shape policy outcomes. This paper studiesa comparatively neglected aspect of this - the forces that shape het-erogeneous performance of autocracies. The paper develops a simpletheoretical model of...

In the field of housing economics, there is a long traditionof evaluating housing outcomes for the entire populationand various subgroups by tracking four key variables, orconcepts: the physical adequacy of the occupied housingunit, the number of people living in the unit relative to thenumber...

[...]In this paper, we update this affordability debateusing data from the 1990s. We follow Gyourko and Linneman(1993) in addressing the affordability issue by asking asimple question: Is a home of a given quality from ten ortwenty years ago more or less affordable today to a householdsimilarly...

Despite the kind of scholarly attention that has been attracted in the field ofChinese economic history in the past half a century or so, basic quantities ofsome basic factors have remained disagreed. Chinese population is one of them.For example, for the post-1350 period, the gap between...

“Population” is often a significant unit of analysis, and a point of passage for facts and models moving between the natural and social sciences, and between animals and humans. But the very existence of a population is a “fact” fraught with challenges: What distinguishes a population...

Eugenics has played an important role in the relations between social and biological scientists of population through time. Having served as a site for the sharing of data and methods between disciplines in the early twentieth century, scientists and historians have tended to view its legacy in...