The US trade war against China in 2018-2019 can either enhance or diminish the US soft power in China, depending on whether it is recognized as legitimate by Chinese citizens. We study how the viewership of US movies--an important element of the US soft power--is affected by the trade war,...

Much has been written about deterrence, the process of committing to punish an adversary to prevent an attack. But in sufficiently rich environments where attacks evolve over time, formulating a strategy involves not only deterrence but also appeasement, the less costly process of not responding...

We construct a model of simultaneous change and persistence in institutions. The model consists of landowning elites and workers, and the key economic decision concerns the form of economic institutions regulating the transaction of labor (e.g., competitive markets versus labor repression). The...

We provide a general framework for the analysis of the dynamics of institutional change (e.g., democratization, extension of political rights or repression of different groups), and how these dynamics interact with (anticipated and unanticipated) changes in the distribution of political power...

In this paper I quantify a gain that a country receives when its global influence is considered to be admirable by others. I use a standard gravity model of bilateral exports, a panel of data from 2006 through 2013, and an annual survey conducted for the BBC by GlobeScan which asks people in up...

Thomas Piketty's (2014) book, Capital in the 21st Century, follows in the tradition of the great classical economists, like Marx and Ricardo, in formulating general laws of capitalism to diagnose and predict the dynamics of inequality. We argue that general economic laws are unhelpful as a guide...

We study the curious patterns of gold holding and trading by central banks during 1979-2010. With the exception of several discrete step adjustments, central banks keep maintaining passive stocks of gold, independently of the patterns of the real price of gold. We also observe the...

We revisit the debate over whether political institutions cause economic growth, or whether, alternatively, growth and human capital accumulation lead to institutional improvement. We find that most indicators of institutional quality used to establish the proposition that institutions cause...

Although we cannot conceive of processes of economic growth that do not involve institutional change, in this essay we outline some reasons why one should be cautious about grounding a theory of growth on institutions. We emphasize how very different institutional structures have often been...