Showing 1 - 10 of 219
Rugged individualism--the combination of individualism and anti-statism--is a prominent feature of American culture with deep roots in the country's history of frontier settlement. Today, rugged individualism is more prevalent in counties with greater total frontier experience (TFE) during the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012481079
A long-standing debate concerns the rationality of slave owners and this paper addresses that debate within the context of manumission. Using a new sample of 19th-century Virginia manumissions, I show that manumission was associated with the productive characteristics of slaves. More productive...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012462948
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. In each case independence was followed by political...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012466051
-specific characteristics such as the level of political freedom are taken into account. Political freedom is shown to explain terrorism, but it … does so in a non-monotonic way: countries in some intermediate range of political freedom are shown to be more prone to … terrorism than countries with high levels of political freedom or countries with highly authoritarian regimes. This result …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012467830
Hayek (1960) distinguishes the institutions of English freedom, which guarantee the independence of judges from … political interference in the administration of justice, from those of American freedom, which allow judges to restrain law … reflect these institutions of English and American freedom, and ask whether these rules predict economic and political freedom …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012469956
The freedom of citizens to form voluntary associations has long been viewed as an essential ingredient of modern civil … society. Our chapter revises the standard Tocquevillian account of associational freedom in the early United States by …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012457513
"This paper studies the cycles of nationalization and privatization in resource-rich economies. We discuss available evidence on the drivers and consequences of privatization and nationalization, review the existing literature, and present illustrative case studies. Our main contribution is then...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011394323
"Is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution? Or, were pre-industrial incomes and life expectancies as unequal as they are today? For want of sufficient data, these questions have not yet been answered. This paper infers inequality for 14 ancient, pre-industrial societies using...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010521497
This paper uses earnings histories obtained from the Social Security Administration and linked to the survey responses for participants in the Health and Retirement Study to investigate redistribution under the current social security benefit formula. We find that as advertised, at the level of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012471172
People earn just enough to get by' is a phrase often used to explain the low personal saving rate in the United States. The implicit presumption is that households simply do not earn enough to pay for current needs' and to save. We show in this paper that at all levels of lifetime earnings there...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012471253