The Great Recession led to a large decline in economic activity throughout the entire United States with significant variation in its severity across regions. Our paper examines the role of economic freedom in explaining these differences at the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) level. We use...

This paper contributes to the literature that uses the Economic Freedom of North America (EFNA) index to evaluate relationships with various outcomes. Most of the literature estimates a linear relationship between economic freedom and those outcomes. However, using matching methods can be a...

Previous work has demonstrated the potential for wheat market integration between the US and the UK before the 'first era of globalization' in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was however frequently interrupted by policy and 'exogenous' events such as war. This paper adds Canada to...

This paper uses the censuses of 1842 of Canada East (modern day Quebec) and Canada West (modern day Ontario) to help explain the historical differences in living standards between Canada and the United States. The argument made in this paper is that Canada East was substantially poorer than the...

Long term measures of income inequality must grapple with the challenges presented by incomplete historical records. In this paper we examine one such problem affecting the quality of federal income tax return data in the period between the two World Wars, which form the basis for the widely...

We present a new series for top income concentrations in the United States, using a consistent data construction methodology for the entire range of available data. This is meant to connect efforts that have separately considered pre-1960 and post-1960 inequality measures. Our series improves...