A fundamental principle of economics with which Adam Smith begins The Wealth of Nations is the division of labor. Some firms, however, have been pursuing a practice called job rotation, which assigns each worker not to a single and specific task but to a set of several tasks among which he or...

Methods of tax collection employed by modern governments seem dull when compared to the rich variety observed in history. Whereas most governments today typically use salaried agents to collect taxes, various other types of contractual relationships have been observed in history, including...

A fundamental question of economic and technological history is why some civilizations adopted new and important technologies and others did not. In this paper, we construct a simple political-economy model that suggests that rulers may not accept a productivity-enhancing technology when it...

A fundamental principle of economics is that specialization and the division of labor increase the productivity of workers by allowing them to concentrate on narrowly defined tasks. However, not all firms appear to promote a high degree of specialization, but instead rotate workers among several...

Risk and transaction costs often provide competing explanations of institutional outcomes. In this paper we argue that they offer opposing predictions regarding the assignment of fixed and variable taxes in a multi-tiered governmental structure. While the central government can pool regional...

A fundamental principle of economics with which Adam Smith begins The Wealth of Nations is the division of labor. Some firms, however, have been pursuing a practice called job rotation, which assigns each worker not to a single and specific task but to a set of several tasks among which he or...