We estimate the effect of immigrant flows on native employment in Western Europe, and then ask whether the employment consequences of immigration vary with institutions that affect labor market flexibility. Reduced flexibility may protect natives from immigrant competition in the near term, but...

We estimate the effect of immigrant flows on native employment in Western Europe, and then ask whether the employment consequences of immigration vary with institutions that affect labor market flexibility. Reduced flexibility may protect natives from immigrant competition in the near term, but...

The central thesis of the essay is that a successful process of national capitalist development in a world market characterized by the existence of multiple national currencies and divided in the hegemonic developed countries of the First World and the underdeveloped dependent countries of the...

Recent data advances have opened exciting new avenues for analyzing the political economy of foreign aid. Recent papers have looked at the social, environmental or welfare implications of aid. This paper, however, combines geo-referenced data on foreign aid with a similarly coded dataset of FDI...

This article examines how The wealth of nations (1776) was transformed into an amorphous text regarding the imperial question throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Adam Smith had left behind an ambiguous legacy on the subject of empire: a legacy that left long-term effects...

Adam Smith proposed three contradictory theories of the British Empire in the Wealth of Nations. The first view holds that the empire was created for merchants eager to monopolize the colonial trade. Smith concludes that “Great Britain derives nothing but loss” from the colonies. In the...

This Article argues that the norms and legal practices of global finance in the arenas of sovereign debt and private wealth have led to a significant market failure, in particular the over-supply of sovereign borrowing and a related misallocation of global capital away from its most productive...

There exist multiple rationales for the U.S. extraterritorial tax system. The rationales seek to explain why overseas Americans should be subject to worldwide taxation by the United States.This paper challenges those rationales: The allegiance rationale is outmoded and rejected by the U.S....

In Hume's epistemology, induction leads to discovery in matters of fact. However, because of the poor data Hume analyzes the balance of trade with a thought experiment, doing what Mill makes explicit afterwards: reason from assumptions, to reach conclusions which are true in the abstract. Hume's...

The problems posed by monetary policy cannot be dealt with by legislating enduring policy rules. With the passage of time, economic understanding does not systematically converge ever more closely on a "true" model of the economy, a process which is now sufficiently far along that our current...