The first chapter of this dissertation considers the complexity of contracts to be determined bytransacting partners based on their exposure to the opportunistic behavior of theother. A transaction cost economics model generates the hypothesis that buyer andseller relationship-specific...

This thesis examines the effect of integration on wages when the economy is partially unionized. The first part sets up a general equilibrium model where wages in one sector are set by a monopoly union. The unionized sector of the economy also utilizes a factor (capital) which is internationally...

The history of England’s institutions has long informed research on comparative economic development. Yet to date there exists no quantitative evidence on a core aspect of England’s institutional evolution, that embodied in the accumulated decisions of English courts. Focusing on the two...

This is the second of two papers that generate and analyze quantitative estimates of the development of English caselaw and associated legal ideas before the Industrial Revolution. In the first paper, we estimated a 100-topic structural topic model, named the topics, and showed how to interpret...

We generate and analyze data pertinent to the role of caselaw in England's economic development during the Industrial Revolution. Applying topic modeling to a corpus of 67,455 reports on English court cases, we construct annual time series of caselaw developments between 1765 and 1865. We then...

We combine unsupervised machine-learning and econometric methods to examine cultural change in 16th- and 17th-century England. A machine-learning digest synthesizes the content of 57,863 texts comprising 83 million words into 110 topics. The topics include the expected, such as Natural...