We estimate the long-term effect of public R&D on growth in manufacturing by analyzing new data from the Cold War era Space Race. We develop a novel empirical strategy that leverages US-Soviet rivalry in space technology to isolate windfall R&D spending. Our results demonstrate that public R&D...

The adoption of workers' compensation in the 1910s, from a variety of perspectives, was a significant event in the economic, legal, and political history of the United States. The legislation represented the first instance of a widespread social insurance program in the United States, setting...

Although workers, employers, and insurance companies by 1910 supported the adoption of workers' compensation, they fiercely debated the specific features of the legislation. In this paper we examine how workers' compensation benefit levels were determined in the political process of forging...

Market responses to legislative reforms often mitigate the expected gains that reformers promise in legislation. Contemporaries hailed workers' compensation as a boon to workers because it raised the amount of post-accident compensation paid to injured workers. Despite the large gains to...

A central question concerning the economic motivation for the adoption of workers' compensation is the extent to which workers had access to their desired levels of private accident insurance around the turn of the century. If insurance were rationed then workers' primary option would have been...

This paper provides a positive analysis of how formal, periodic legislative oversight of regulatory agencies can influence market outcomes and the welfare of regulated industries. Whereas previous research has focused on the political distinction between passive and active legislative oversight,...