One of the most distinctive characteristics of the U.S. telephone system is that it has always been privately owned, in stark contrast to the pattern of government ownership followed by virtually every other nation. What is not widely known is how close the United States came to falling in line...

We formulate a model to explain why the lack of political competition may stifle economic performance and use the United States as a testing ground for the model’s predictions, exploiting the 1965 Voting Rights Act which helped break the near monpoly on political power of the Democrats in...

This chapter adopts the working assumption that it is conceivable that at some time in the future it would be in the interest of the United States to restructure its sovereign debt (i.e., to reduce the principal amount). It addresses in particular U.S. Treasury Securities. The chapter first...

The United States leads the world in the complexity of its regulatory takings law, the amount of academic writing devoted to the topic, and the intensity of the surrounding public debate. This is one of the (ancillary) findings of a large-scale comparative study of regulatory takings law. A look...

We report a small-sample, preliminary evaluation of the economic impact of temporary overseas work by Haitian agricultural workers. This work occurs in the USA in the context of a pilot program designed as a form of post-disaster development assistance to Haiti. We find that the effects of...

The grant element is the “gift portion” of a financial transaction. The mathematical technique for arriving at a precise grant element percentage was first proposed by John Pincus of the RAND Corporation in 1963, and developed mathematically by Göran Ohlin of the Development Centre in 1966....

We report a small-sample, preliminary evaluation of the economic impact of temporary overseas work by Haitian agricultural workers. This work occurs in the USA in the context of a pilot program designed as a form of post-disaster development assistance to Haiti. We find that the effects of...