This paper studies the evolution of Venezuelan economic institutions before the emergence of oil exploitation in 1920. We argue that by 1920 Venezuela had developed a highly centralized state and a professionalized military. These two institutions ensured that growing oil revenues would...

Scheduled to appear as Chapter 7 in "Labor and Employment Law and Economics", a volume in Edward Elgar’s second edition of the Encyclopedia of Law and Economics

This paper explores the relevance of unknown nonlinearities for growth empirics. Recent theoretical contributions and case-study evidence suggest that nonlinearities are pervasive in the growth process. I show that the postwar data provide strong evidence in favor of generalized non-linearities....

Recently, two stylized facts about the behavior of the U.S. economy have emerged: first, macroeconomic aggregates appear to be less volatile post-1984 than in the preceding two decades; second, monetary policy appears more responsive to inflationary pressures—and thereby more “stabilizing”...

This paper proposes a simple mechanism for evaluating the relevance of credibility problems in politics. If candidates are capable of making credible policy promises, we will not expect them to systematically adopt platforms that entail large probabilities of losing an election. This is because...

We estimate the impact of U.S. monetary policy on the cross-sectional distribution of state economic activity for a 35-year panel. Our results indicate that the effects of policy have a significant history dependence, in that relatively slow growth regions contract more following...

Yohe and Tol (2001) built an indexing method for vulnerability based on the hypothesis that the adaptive capacity for any system facing a vector of external stresses could be explained by the weakest of eight underlying determinants – the so-called “weakest link” hypothesis. Subsequent...

Tol (2003) found evidence that the uncertainty that surrounds estimates of the marginal damage of climate change may be infinite even if total damages are finite and questioned the applicability of expected cost-benefit analysis to global mitigation policy. Yohe (2003) suggested that this...