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The U.S. Constitution and Monetary Powers: An Analysis of the 1787 Constitutional Convention and Constitutional Transformation of the Nation's Monetary System Emerged

Grubb, Farley - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2005

The monetary powers embedded in the U.S. Constitution were revolutionary and led to a watershed transformation in the nation's monetary structure. They included determining what monies could be legal tender, who could emit fiat paper money, and who could incorporate banks. How the debate at the...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005087446

The Origins of State Capacity: Property Rights, Taxation, and Politics

Besley, Timothy; Persson, Torsten - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2007

Economists generally assume the existence of sufficient institutions to sustain a market economy and tax the citizens. However, this starting point cannot easily be taken for granted in many states, neither in history nor in the developing world of today. This paper develops a framework where...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005829304

Lost Decades: Lessons from Post-Independence Latin America for Today's Africa

Williamson, Jeffrey Gale; Bates, Robert H.; Coatsworth, … - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2006

Africa and Latin America secured their independence from European colonial rule a century and half apart: most of Latin … America after 1820 and most of Africa after 1960. Despite the distance in time and space, they share important similarities … about a half-century (lost decades). The parallels suggest that Africa might be exiting from a period of post …

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005718756

The Prospects for Sustained Growth in Africa: Benchmarking the Constraints

Johnson, Simon; Ostry, Jonathan David; Subramanian, Arvind - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2007

sustained growth for sub-Saharan Africa. This analysis suggests that what are usually regarded as first-order problems -- broad … institutions, macroeconomic stability, trade openness, education, and inequality -- may not nowbe binding constraints in Africa … Africa. A key question is to what extent Africa can rely on manufactured exports as a mode of "escape from underdevelopment …

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005718867

Institutions and Behavior: Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Democracy

Dal Bó, Pedro; Putterman, Louis; Foster, Andrew - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2008

A novel experiment is used to show that the effect of a policy on the level of cooperation is greater when it is chosen democratically by the subjects than when it is exogenously imposed. In contrast to the previous literature, our experimental design allows us to control for selection effects...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005830529

Smart Machines and Long-Term Misery

Kotlikoff, Laurence; Sachs, Jeffrey D. - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2012

Are smarter machines our children's friends? Or can they bring about a transfer from our relatively unskilled children to ourselves that leaves our children and, indeed, all our descendants - worse off? This, indeed, is the dire message of the model presented here in which smart machines...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010951178

Politics and Economics in Weak and Strong States

Acemoglu, Daron - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2005

While much research in political economy points out the benefits of "limited government," political scientists have long emphasized the problems created in many less developed nations by "weak states," which lack the power to tax and regulate the economy and to withstand the political and social...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005777958

Government Intervention in the Markets for Education and Health Care: How and Why?

Poterba, James - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 1994

Education and health care are the two largest government expenditure items in the United States. The public sector directly provides the majority of educational services, through the public school bureaucracy, while most public support for health care is channelled through a system of...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005778624

Rational Discounting for Regulatory Analysis

Viscusi, W Kip - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2006

This article examines the economic basis for what is termed %u201Crational discounting,%u201D which entails full recognition of policy effects over time and exponential discounting at a riskless rate of return. Policies often cannot be ranked unambiguously in terms of their present or future...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005829821

Segregation and the Quality of Government in a Cross-Section of Countries

Alesina, Alberto; Zhuravskaya, Ekaterina - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2008

This paper has three goals. The first (and perhaps the most important one) is to provide a new compilation of data on ethnic, linguistic and religious composition at the sub-national level for a large number of countries. This data set allows us to measure segregation of different ethnic,...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005830650