This paper studies the historical origins of the federalist institutions in Mexico and Brazil. Using a bargaining game model, I argue that the type of commodities each country produced by the end of the nineteenth Century determined the negotiation power of local governments. This led to the...

In this paper, we argue that the complexion of housing finance systems in OECD countries, both now and historically, has a significant bearing on a number of core housing-related indicators, including housing form, tenure composition, and urban development. Existing literature in the fields of...

During the Civil War the Arkansas legislature funded their expenditures primarily through interest-bearing warrants and war bonds. After these issues were made legal tender in November 1861, the discount attributed to them disappeared immediately and they began to circulate widely. By mid- 1862...

This paper explores the role of political stability on fiscal policy choices in a time-series analysis over 158 years on the Swiss federal level. We argue that the fiscal-commons problem of public finances is affected by the time-horizon of a finance minister. Arguably, the incentives for an...

The fate of the distressed debt issued by the 1836-1845 Republic of Texas has received surprisingly little attention. Annexation by the United States was almost certainly a necessary condition for the debt rising from the pennies-on-the-dollar values seen in the early 1840s. But the largest...

During the Civil War the Arkansas legislature funded their expenditures primarily through interest-bearing warrants and war bonds. After these issues were made legal tender in November 1861, the discount attributed to them disappeared immediately and they began to circulate widely. By mid- 1862...

The purpose of the essay is twofold: a) explore the ability of S. Huntington's model of political development for societies in process of modernization to explain the Argentine political history in 1880-1955; b) prove the hypothesis that mass pretorianism is inherently unstable. We conclude the...

This study investigate how debt restructurings have evolved over the decades. Debtors and creditors have a long history of engaging an outsider a third party”, such as the IMF to organise and facilitate debt restructurings. As we show, the importance of these third parties” has grown over...

This paper uses the framework of arbitrage-pricing theory to study the relationship between liquidity risk and sovereign bond risk premia. The London Stock Exchange in the late 19th century is an ideal laboratory in which to test the proposition that liquidity risk affects the price of sovereign...