We examine the empirical relationship between the occurrence of inter-state conflicts and the degree of relatedness between countries, measured by genetic distance. We find that populations that are genetically closer are more prone to go to war with each other, even after controlling for...

We analyze panel data for the worldwide commodities sector using a sample of 6,323 firms from 69 countries with annual observations from 1999 to 2010. The effect of return on equity on market-to-book is time-varying and declining across the years in the sample. First, there is positive and...

This chapter discusses the process of European institutional integration from a political-economy perspective, linking the long-standing political debate on the nature of the European project to the recent economic literature on political integration and disintegration. First, we introduce the...

We investigate the historical dynamics of the decline in fertility in Europe and its relation to measures of cultural and ancestral distance. We test the hypothesis that the decline of fertility was associated with the diffusion of social and behavioral changes from France, in contrast with the...

This paper examines the role of patent policy in a spatial model of sequential innovation. Initial entrepreneurs develop a new product market and anticipate that subsequent innovation may lead to a product line that consumers value more highly. The likelihood of sequential innovation increases...

For thousands of years, the Chinese and many other nations around the workd built defensive walls around their cities. This phenomenon is not well understood from an economic perspective. To rationalize the existence of city walls, we propose a simple model that relates the deimesions of city...

How does isolation affect the economic activity of cities? Transport costs are widely considered an important barrier to local economic activity but their impact in developing countries is not well-studied. This paper investigates the role of inter-city transport costs in determining the income...

This paper presents the results from a field experiment which varies the amount of information seen by two million job seekers when viewing 100,000 job postings on a large online job posting website. The information seen is the true number of people who previously started an application. This...

We examine changes in the use of nontax revenues for education finance from 1991-2010. Beyond the summary of usage over time, we ask whether non- traditional revenues like fees accentuate or mitigate the impact of downturns. More generally, we examine the extent to which school districts have...

The paper addresses the issue of corruption, which appears to be endemic in Greece. It reviews the facts about corruption as multi-faceted phenomenon and its close relationship to tax evasion, by comparing Greece to its EU partners, as well internationally. It addresses corruption as an instance...