This study exploits the confiscation and auctioning off of Church property that occurred during the French Revolution to assess the role played by transaction costs in delaying the reallocation of property rights in the aftermath of fundamental institutional reform. French districts with a...

The socio-economic impact of Reaganomics and its long-run deleterious legacy is documented. The preponderance of data indicate that economic growth was not particularly impressive in the wake of the tax cuts of 1981 or 1986. GDP did snap back to potential but failed to accelerate beyond the...

When confronted with market weaknesses and failures determining sustainability problems for environmental common-pool resources, economic analysis has proposed government intervention as the only alternative available. Elinor Ostrom showed that this dichotomy between market and government is not...

This paper introduces two ideas, emotional state dependent utility components (ESDUCs), and evolutionary perfect Bayesian equilibrium (EPBE). Using a simple extensive form game, we illustrate the efficiency-enhancing role of a powerful ESDUC, the vengeance motive. Incorporating behavioral noise...

This paper traces the 11,000 year evolution of infrastructure systems during major periods of innovation, expansion and diffusion. Throughout history, the key role of the State is self-evident. Private sector involvement has waxed and waned over millennia, although at times it has been pivotal...

We analyze the equilibrium effects of different subsidies on target goods under both perfectly competitive and monopolistic market structures. We concentrate our analysis on three particularly common forms of subsidies: (i) a per-unit subsidy, (ii) an ad valorem subsidy, and (iii) an "inversely...

Empirical evidence on the historical role of Compulsory Schooling Laws (CSL) for the spread of mass education is mixed at best. This is also due to the difficulty of identifying exogenous variation in the application of CSL. We exploit an almost unique feature of a CSL in 1877 Italy which was...

We study how connections to German federal parliamentarians affect firm dynamics by constructing a novel dataset linking politicians and election candidates to the universe of firms. To identify the causal effect of access to political power, we exploit (i) new appointments to the company...

The institutional reforms France imposed in the parts of Germany it occupied in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are claimed to provide an example of successful externally-imposed institutional reforms. The most detailed study is that of Lecce and Ogliari (2019), who argue that...

This paper presents new evidence on how demography affects attitudes toward democracy and policy preferences. The empirical analysis disentangles age effects from cohort effects and separates their role from economic and political factors that shape political preferences in a given period, using...