This essay offers a brief history of macroeconomics, together with an evaluation of what has been learned over the past several decades. It is based on the premise that the field has evolved through the efforts of two types of macroeconomist%u2014 those who understand the field as a type of...

This paper estimates the nature and magnitude of the local externalities from own industry scale, as envisioned by Marshall. Census panel data on individual plants in high-tech and machinery industries across up to 487 countries are utilized, to quantify the direct effects of local external...

On December 31 1933, The New York Times published an open letter from John Maynard Keynes to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In it Keynes encouraged FDR to expand public works through government borrowing. He also criticized FDR's exchange rate policy, and argued that there was a need for lower...

This paper develops a simple theoretical framework to study a set of regions, each with its own regional government, who share a union or central government. These governments must decide whether to implement or discard a large number of projects that produce local benefits for the region that...

Quality of public institutions has been recognized as a crucial determinant of macroeconomic outcomes. We propose that a country's intrinsic level of openness (due to population size, geography, or exogenous trade opportunities) affects its incentives in investing in better institutions. We...

The recent Eurozone crisis of 2010-2013 has brought to the fore the argument that a successful monetary union needs to be combined with a fiscal union. The history of the U.S. monetary/fiscal union is often given as a template for Europe. In this paper we describe how the push towards creation...

We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states, in line with the view that this isolation reduces accountability, and in contrast with the alternative hypothesis that it might forestall political capture. We then provide direct...

A fundamental problem for economic development is that most poor countries have 'weak state' which are incapable or unwilling to provide basic public goods such as law enforcement, order, education and infrastructure. In Africa this is often attributed to the persistence of 'indirect rule' from...

International development agencies invest heavily in institution building in fragile states, including expensive interventions to support democratic elections. Yet little evidence exists on whether elections enhance the domestic legitimacy of governments. Using the random assignment of an...