Bitcoin has enabled competition between digital cryptocurrencies and traditional legal tender fiat currencies. Despite rapidly increasing acceptance, so far the affirmation of cryptocurrency as better money has been thwarted by dramatic deflationary price instability. Successful at disposing of...

This article argues that bank supervision sits at the center of two foundational tensions in the governance of American finance. The first is the extent to which the financial system is controlled by public actors (i.e., the government) or private actors (i.e., the banks). The second is the...

A fundamental problem in the field of the economics of innovation is how to explain the sources of path-breaking innovations that support the human development and socioeconomic progress in complex societies. The study here confronts this problem by developing the theoretical framework of global...

The need for transition to indefinitely sustainable macro economic production functions and the attendant required evolution of modern portfolio theory are discussed. A new, 'next economy' methodology is proposed to practically apply modern realities to portfolios in meaningful ways. Existing...

This paper argues that openness to goods trade in combination with an unequal distribution of political power has been a major determinant of the comparatively slow development of resource- or land-abundant regions like South America and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century. We develop a...

Although social institutions permeate the world in which we live, they are all but absent from our analyses of economic growth and development. This paper argues the need to mitigate this omission by demonstrating the importance of social institutions for growth and development. -- institutions...

We analyze the role of risk-sharing institutions in transitions to modern economies. Transitions requires individual-level risk-taking in pursuing productivity-enhancing activities including using and developing new knowledge. Individual-level, idiosyncratic risk implies that distinct...

Why do inefficient - non-growth enhancing - institutions emerge and persist? This paper develops a simple framework to provide some answers to this question. Political institutions determine the allocation of political power, and economic institutions determine the framework for policy-making...

This research explores the historical roots of the division of labor in pre-modern societies. Exploiting a variety of identification strategies and a novel ethnic level dataset combining geocoded ethnographic, linguistic and genetic data, it shows that higher levels of intra-ethnic diversity...