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...

In this essay I review the new book by Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini, The Economic Effects of Constitutions, which investigates the policy and economic consequences of different forms of government and electoral rules. I also take advantage of this opportunity to discuss the advantages and...

During the 1840s, twelve American states adopted new constitutions. Eleven of the twelve states adopted new procedures for issuing government debt and for chartering corporations through general incorporation acts. These institutional innovations were American inventions, and today hard budget...

The paper presents empirical findings regarding the economic policy consequences of constitutional arrangements, in three different dimensions. First, the data are consistent with several theoretical predictions about the consequences of electoral rules and forms of government for fiscal policy...

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-making powers of the sovereign through constitutional...

A self-enforcing constitution creates a political process that provides an alternative to civil conflict for resolving disputes among the constituent groups of the polity. This paper is concerned with discovering the conditions under which it is possible to design such a self-enforcing...

We propose a framework to explain why some societies may end up with different constitutional solutions to the problem of maintaining order in the face of self-interested behavior. Though the salient intellectual tradition since Hobbes has focused on how institutional design is used to eradicate...

We conduct a comprehensive analysis of unspanned stochastic volatility in commodity markets in general and the crude-oil market in particular. We present model-free results that strongly suggest the presence of unspanned stochastic volatility in the crude-oil market. We then develop a tractable...

During World War II the Allies controlled Spain's oil supply in order to limit Spain's support for the Axis. This experiment with sanctions is unusually informative because a wide range of policies was tried over a long period. Three episodes are of special interest: (1) a total embargo on oil...

From 1997 through early 2003, the United Nations Oil for Food Program allowed Iraq to export oil in exchange for humanitarian supplies. We measure the extent to which this program was corrupted by Iraq's attempts to deliberately set the price of its oil below market prices in an effort to...