The most important event in human economic history before the Industrial Revolution was the Neolithic transition from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle to sedentary agriculture, beginning about 10,000 years ago. The transition made possible the human population explosion, the rise of...

In this paper we use a standard multi-union, monopolistic competition model to evaluate analytically and numerically the effects of monetary policy on inflation and unemployment under different institutional arrangements in the labor market that are defined by the rigidity of nominal wages. We...

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...

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...

published in <p> The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy Barry R. Weingast and Donald Wittman, eds. Oxford University Press, 2006 <p>

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...

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...

In this paper we propose a model of how institutional benefits, taxation and government regulations affect the productive activity of private enterprises. We consider an environment in which public officials enforcing tax and regulatory obligations are potentially corruptible, and markets for...

In this paper, we evaluate the effects of monetary policy on inflation and unemployment under different institutional arrangements in the labor market. We show that the effects of monetary policy on the real economy depend critically on the wage formation regime, and on the ways in which the...

A growing literature in economics examines the development of preferences among children and adolescents. We combine a repeated dictator game with treatments that either provides participants with information about the average behavior of others or not. In a sample of 384 children aged 5-17, we...