Bank regulators consider minimum capital standards essential for promoting well-functioning banking systems. Despite their existence, however, such standards have been insufficient to prevent periodic disruptions in the banking sectors of various countries. The most recent disruption was the...

This study reports estimates of the marginal benefits and costs of increasing the regulatory minimum bank equity-to-asset “leverage ratio” from 4 to 15 percent. Benefits arise from reducing the probability of a banking crisis. Costs arise from reduced lending, should banks pass off higher...

Excessive party switching potentially weakens accountability and ideological coherence based on which party-based democracies operate. This study empirically analyzes party switching in the Philippine House of Representations, touching on issues at the macro-level (e.g. the legislative model) to...

A century after it was first published, Charles A. Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution remains a significant and controversial part of constitutional scholarship and history. Just as Beard sought to historicize the Founders as they drafted and adopted the Constitution, this...

We exploit the quasi-randomization of alcohol consumption created by state-level alcohol prohibition laws passed in the U.S. in the early part of the 20th century. Using a large dataset of World War II enlistees, we exploit the differential timing of these laws to examine their effects on adult...

Political dynasties are ubiquitous in the Philippine local government landscape, yet none more so than in the Dinagat Islands, a province where members of one family — the Ecleos — have dominated local government politics since the province was carved out of Surigao del Norte in 2006. The...

This study contributes to the literature on political dynasties and their links to economic development by focusing on the case of India, in particular the members of the parliament (MPs) of sixteenth Lok Sabha (i.e., the lower house of the Indian parliament). It is notable for it marked a...

"Just and Reasonable" is the standard language in both the Federal Power Act and most state regulatory acts, yet it is rarely defined. Parsing the terms provides little illumination as to their meaning. The meaning of just and reasonable has evolved from its origin in Roman and Medieval law,...

Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong view US economic policy extending up to 1980 as pragmatically fostering growth. This they interpret as the Hamiltonian tradition, and their intent is to rescue policy debate from the data- and logic-free quagmire into which they believe it has fallen....

Woman suffrage led to the greatest enfranchisement in the history of the United States. Before World War I, however, suffrage states remained almost exclusively confined to the American West. The reasons for this pioneering role of the West are still unclear. Studying the timing of woman...