Why have economic reforms aimed at reducing the role of the state been successful in some cases but not others? Are reform failures the consequence of leviathan states that hinder private economic activity, or of weak states unable to implement policies effectively and provide a supportive...

We examine the impact of political turnover on economic performance in a setting of largely unanticipated political change and profoundly weak institutions: the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Exploiting census-type panel data on over 7,000 manufacturing enterprises, we find that the...

In the last decade, nearly a dozen countries, once part of the USSR, have undertaken the transition to market economies. In some cases, the new economic systems that have developed cannot be squeezed into any theoretically generalized models of capitalism. The main reason these systems evade...

Domar (1970) has singled out the land/labor ratio as the main cause of both slavery and serfdom. But he then recognizes that scarcity of labor is necessary but not sufficient for serfdom to exist, and that an exogenous political factor is required to determine the status of labor.I show that in...

In the past two decades, controversial evidence has been produced supporting the case for local protectionism in China. This paper overviews the most important contributions and presents a new approach which applies spatial econometrics on prefectural-level data. The main advantage of this...

Although anthropologists along with historians and academic circles point to no ethnographic evidence to confirm or deny the existence of barter among the prehistoric people in the new Stone Age (the Neolithic epoch during 9000-6000 BC.), the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith believed...

In countries where tools of economic control are immature and disabled due to totalitarian systems, macroeconomic analyses for aggregate quantities and relationships, such as total consumption, investment, and government expenditures represents a difficult task. The practice of aggregation...

In the past two decades, controversial evidence has been produced supporting the case for local protectionism in China. This paper overviews the most important contributions and presents a new approach which applies spatial econometrics on prefectural-level data. The main advantage of this...

Why have economic reforms aimed at reducing the role of the state been successful in some cases but not others? Are reform failures the consequence of leviathan states that hinder private economic activity, or of weak states unable to implement policies effectively and provide a supportive...