We provide quantitative evidence on the relationship between military spending and innovation in the 19th century. Combining innovation data from world fairs and historical military data across Europe, we show that national military spending is associated with national innovation towards war...

We discuss recent work evaluating the role of the government in shaping the economy during the long 19th century, a practice we refer to as industrial policy. We show that states deployed a vast variety of different policies aimed at, primarily, but not exclusively, fostering industrialization....

Many economic and political decisions are the outcome of strategic contests for a given prize. The nature of such contests can be determined by a designer who is driven by political considerations with a specific political culture. The main objective of this study is to analyze the effect of...

We compiled data on all United Nations General Assembly resolutions on which voting took place between January 1990 and June 2013 and find a preoccupation with one country: in 65 percent of instances in which a country is criticized in a resolution, the country is Israel, with no other country...

In this paper we study the endogenous determination of monopoly price. Our proposed game of endogenous monopoly-price setting extends the literature on monopoly-price, monopoly rent-seeking contests and monopoly rent-seeking rent-avoidance contests by (i) determining the monopoly price such that...

The relationship between the distribution of political rights and that of economic resources has been studied both theoretically and empirically. This paper reviews the existing literature and, in particular, the available empirical evidence.Our reading of the literature suggests that formal...