Since the “third wave” of democratization began in 1974, nearly 100 states have adopted democratic forms of government, including, of course, most of the former Soviet bloc nations. Policy-makers in the west have expressed the hope that this democratic wave will extend even further, to the...

This paper reassesses the political reaction in the United States to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in terms of economics and evolutionary biology. The fact that war and its threat were ever-present in human evolution resulted in two social propensities that render society vulnerable...

Modern economic history can be roughly split into different eras in which certain sets of ideas dominate politics and policy-making. This paper seeks to understand if a shift in the 'political economic paradigm' is currently under way by inspecting the state of debates across a range of economic...

Since 2008, the U.S. economy has been mired in the second worst economic crisis in its history. Conceivably, massive government spending could bring the economy out of this slump as massive war spending ultimately ended the Great Depression of the 1930s. However, a far superior strategy exists:...

When can a donor (successfully) exit from an on-the-ground presence in a post-conflict state? The answer, according to the analysis presented here, is in decades: figures well beyond what was originally envisioned when peacekeeping troops were first deployed. In the specific cases of Liberia,...

The size of the average American household has fallen dramatically - from six in 1850 to three in 2000. To explain this decline we model households as collections of roommates who share the costs of household public goods. If private goods are more income elastic than public goods, as we...

This paper studies the long-run effects of concertaje, a forced labor system from the Spanish colonial era in Ecuador that coerced indigenous workers in rural estates after indebting them. I collected and digitized historical tax records (1800) and connected them to contemporary ones (2010s) via...

We construct a panel data at the state level in Mexico for the years 2006, 2008 and 2011 in order to investigate the impact that entry deregulation efforts have on the cost of opening new businesses in Mexico, where this cost is taken from the Doing Business in Mexico report of the World Bank....

We review some patterns of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth in the Mexican economy during the period 1991-2011 using the KLEMS data set published by INEGI in 2013. The data shows a strong positive correlation between TFP and output growth. As a result, tests were performed in order to...

In this study we use data on the productive structure of Mexican states to compute a measure of economic complexity for each, as well as for each economic activity conducted there. The results show that the states differ in terms of the economic activities in which they specialize and,...