The transition from a hunter-gather economy to agricultural production, which made possible the endogenous technological progress that ultimately led to the industrial revolution, is one of the most important events in the thousands of years of humankind’s economic development. In this paper...

A simple "Bread and Peace" model shows that aggregate votes for President in postwar elections were determined entirely by weighted-average growth of real disposable personal income per capita during the incumbent party's term and the cumulative numbers of American military personnel killed in...

The effects of wage dispersion on productive efficiency is a topic rich in theoretical conjecture, a common object of Scandinavian polemical debate and at the same time an issue almost barren of systematic econometric evidence. The Swedish record of enormous compression of relative wages under...

In this paper we assess the system-wide economic impact of the key financial instruments adopted by the European Union for the implementation of the regional policy: The Structural funds and The Cohesion Funds. We take a bottom-up approach by aggregating the 86 categories of expenditures defined...

We propose a model of how government-supplied institutional benefits and the taxation and regulation of producers affect the propensity of private firms to enter the unofficial economy and evade taxation. Our analysis implies that the incentive of firms to produce underground depends on tax...

Cohesion policy is the Union's main instrument to promote regional development and reduce disparities among the Union's Member States and regions. It concentrates its support in the fields of R&D, support to SMEs, education, or transport, telecommunication, social and environmental...