This paper investigates the political economy of FEMA’s post-9/11 merger with the Department of Homeland Security. Using panel data for the post-DHS merger but pre-Katrina period, we examine how FEMA’s much-debated reorganization has impacted the strong political influences on disaster...

A country’s political and economic institutions are critical for economic prosperity. The literature abounds with institutional measures, precisely because institutions are multidimensional. We use panel unit root and cointegration tests to examine the time-series properties of several...

A country's political and economic institutions are critical for economic prosperity. The literature abounds with institutional measures, precisely because institutions are multi dimensional. We use panel-unit-root and cointegration tests to examine the time-series properties of several...

Could bad weather be responsible for U.S. corruption? Natural disasters create resource windfalls in the states they strike by triggering federally provided natural-disaster relief. By increasing the benefit of fraudulent appropriation and creating new opportunities for such theft,...

Is capitalism contagious? Since WWI, global foreign policy has treated economic freedom/repression like a virus that spreads between countries. Most recently, the ?domino theory? of freedom has played prominently in U.S. foreign policy toward Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean during the...

Could bad weather be responsible for U.S. corruption? This paper argues that natural disasters create resource windfalls in the states they strike by triggering federally-provided natural disaster relief. Consistent with the theory that natural resource and foreign aid windfalls increase public...

To successfully coordinate natural disaster relief, society must solve Hayek’s “knowledge, problem” at three critical information nodes: (1) identification of disaster; (2) determination of what relief is needed and who needs which relief resources; and (3) evaluation of on-going relief...

Standard theory neglects that enacting price discrimination is costly to firms. When this costliness is accounted for, perfect price discrimination is often socially inefficient. For pure monopolists it is sometimes socially inefficient. For monopolistic competitors it is always socially...

We apply Leeson and Dean’s (2009) method for studying democratic dominoes to capitalist spillovers to compare the rates at which capitalism and democracy spread between countries. We find that capitalism and democracy spread at approximately the same modest rate.

In 2005 Hurricane Katrina posed an unprecedented set of challenges to formal and informal systems of disaster response and recovery. Informed by the Virginia School of Political Economy, the contributors to this study critically examine the public policy environment that led to both successes...