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Rugged individualism--the combination of individualism and anti-statism--is a prominent feature of American culture with deep roots in the country's history of frontier settlement. Today, rugged individualism is more prevalent in counties with greater total frontier experience (TFE) during the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012481079
A long-standing debate concerns the rationality of slave owners and this paper addresses that debate within the context of manumission. Using a new sample of 19th-century Virginia manumissions, I show that manumission was associated with the productive characteristics of slaves. More productive...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012462948
Africa and Latin America secured their independence from European colonial rule a century and half apart: most of Latin America after 1820 and most of Africa after 1960. Despite the distance in time and space, they share important similarities. In each case independence was followed by political...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012466051
-specific characteristics such as the level of political freedom are taken into account. Political freedom is shown to explain terrorism, but it … does so in a non-monotonic way: countries in some intermediate range of political freedom are shown to be more prone to … terrorism than countries with high levels of political freedom or countries with highly authoritarian regimes. This result …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012467830
Hayek (1960) distinguishes the institutions of English freedom, which guarantee the independence of judges from … political interference in the administration of justice, from those of American freedom, which allow judges to restrain law … reflect these institutions of English and American freedom, and ask whether these rules predict economic and political freedom …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012469956
The freedom of citizens to form voluntary associations has long been viewed as an essential ingredient of modern civil … society. Our chapter revises the standard Tocquevillian account of associational freedom in the early United States by …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012457513
This paper describes a range of methods which have been proposed to study interactions in economic and social contexts. By interactions, we refer to interdependences between individual decisions which are not mediated by markets. These types of models have been employed to understand phenomena...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012470930
Mankiw [1982] explores the Permanent Income Hypothesis implication that durable expenditures follow an ARMA(1,1) representation. He finds that durable expenditures are represented by an AR(1) process which implies that the rate of depreciation of durables, under the PIH model, is 100%. This...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012470965
A standard model of addictive process is Becker and Murphy's rational addiction' model, which has the key empirical prediction that the current consumption of addictive goods should respond to future prices, and the key normative prediction that the optimal government regulation of addictive...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012471269
Theory predicts that in markets with increasing returns, the number of differentiated products and resulting consumer satisfaction grow in market size. We document this phenomenon across 246 US radio markets. By a mechanism that we term 'preference externalities', an increase in the size of the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012471394