We present a conceptual framework to better understand the interaction between settlement and the emergence of de facto property rights on frontiers prior to governments establishing and enforcing de jure property rights. In this framework, potential rents associated with more exclusivity drives...

We exploit differences in the mortality rates faced by European colonialists to estimate the effect of institutions on economic performance. Our argument is that Europeans adopted very different colonization policies in different colonies, with different associated institutions. The choice of...

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the North American agricultural frontier moved for the first time into semi-arid regions where farming was vulnerable to drought. Farmers who migrated to the region had to adapt their crops, techniques, and farm sizes to better fit the environment. But...

In this paper we develop a general intertemporal model of production, emphasizing the role of present and expected future corporate income taxes, credits and allowances along with costly adjustment and variable utilization of the quasi-fixed factors. Three specific issues are considered: 1) the...

The neoclassical growth accounting model used by the BLS to sort out the contributions of the various sources of growth in the U.S. economy accords a relatively small role to education. This result seems at variance with the revolution in information technology and the emergence of the...

We develop a tractable model of endogenous production networks. Each one of a number of products can be produced by combining labor and an endogenous subset of the other products as inputs. Different combinations of inputs generate (prespecified) levels of productivity. Markets are...

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Arnold Harberger's celebrated model of the corporation income tax. While the model has been enormously useful as an analytical device for studying two sector economies, its usefulness for understanding the incidence and excess burden of the...

The central thesis of this paper is that the management of portfolios incorporating a variety of investment assets does require the use of time and other scarce resources in searching for, collecting, interpreting, and applying relevant information. Accordingly, the returns on these assets would...

Conventional models of production under uncertainty specify that output is produced in fixed proportions across states of nature. I investigate a representation of technology that allows firms to transform output from one state to another. I allow the firm to choose the distribution of its...

This paper examines the implications of the learning curve in a world of uncertainty. We consider a competitive firm whose costs decline with cumulative output. Because the price of the firm's output evolves stochastically, future production and cumulative output are unknown, and are contingent...