The long-standing view in US economic history is the shift in manufacturing in the nineteenth century from the artisan shop to the mechanized factory led to "labor deskilling." Craft workers were displaced by mix of semi-skilled operatives, unskilled workers, and a reduced force of mechanics to...

In the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution, Western Europe gradually pulled ahead of other world regions in terms of technological creativity, population growth, and income per capita. We argue that superior institutions for the creation and dissemination of productive knowledge...

We investigate the role of mechanical ability as another dimension that, jointly with cognitive and socio-emotional, affects schooling decisions and labor market outcomes. Using a Roy model with a factor structure and data from the NLSY79, we show that the labor market positively rewards...

Our analysis melds two traditional approaches to promoting quality. The first is restoring the stock of quality. The second is curbing its flow of deterioration. Although both approaches are widely used in real world settings, analytic models have tended to focus on one strategy or the other. We...

Credit markets and property rights are fundamental for modern economies, but they also have implications for the commons. Using a dynamic model of competitive resource extraction, we show that improving property right security unambiguously increases conservation incentives, but the effect of...

Standard approaches to environmental and natural resource use externalities generally focus on single-sector resources and user groups. Remedies include Pigouvian-style government constraints, small group controls following Elinor Ostrom, or less frequently, bargaining across users as outlined...

We analyze theoretically an institution called a "limited-tenure concession" for its ability to induce efficient public goods contribution and common-pool resource extraction. The basic idea is that by limiting the tenure over which an agent can enjoy the public good, but offering the...

We develop a consistent and comprehensive theoretical framework for assessing whether economic growth is compatible with sustaining well-being over time. The framework focuses on whether a comprehensive measure of wealth - one that accounts for natural capital and human capital as well as...

The paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a version of the career concerns model of political agency with endogenous entry of political candidates. The evidence...