The purported failure of the classical quantity theory of money in the colonial economy is shown to be a failure of data and not a failure of theory. When new data on the quantity of specie in circulation is added to the current data on paper money and prices, and econometrically estimated in...

The third Marshall-Hicks-Allen rule of elasticity of derived demand purports to show that labor demand is less elastic when labor is a smaller share of total costs. As Hicks, Allen, and then Bronfenbrenner showed, this rule is not quite correct, and actually is complicated by an unexpected...

Using agricultural preservation priorities derived from an analytical hierarchy process by 23 experts from 18 agencies in the State of Delaware, this research uses weighted suitability attributes to evaluate the historical success of the State of Delaware’s agricultural protection fund, which...

Paper money has often been controversial and misunderstood. Why it has value, why that value changes over time, how it influences economic activity, who should be allowed to make it, how its use and creation should be controlled, and whether it should exist at all—are questions that have...

The War for Independence (1775-1783) left the federal government deeply in debt. The spoils from winning that war also gave it an empire of land. So, post-1783 was the federal government solvent, or at what point did it become solvent? Did winning the war, in effect, pay for the war? While these...

The purpose of this paper is to address a fundamental question about higher education. If a country wanted to design a system of higher education, what would the optimal institutional structure of the system look like? This question is very broad so we limit our initial approach by analyzing one...

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) provides marriage bonuses to some married couples and imposes marriage penalties on many others. The sources of these bonuses and penalties are the EITC eligibility rules, its non-linear benefit structure, and the phase-out of benefits at higher incomes. In...

Exchange rates and price indices are constructed to test purchasing power parity between eight British North American colonial locations, five of whom issued their own fiat paper money. Purchasing power parity is then tested between these same locations after six became states politically and...

Recent studies have demonstrated the ability of the interest rate yield spread to predict post-war business cycles. This same methodology is applied to the prediction of interwar business cycles in the United States and the United Kingdom. The spread predicts the early interwar cycles, although...

Our objective is to estimate the extent to which clinical and non-clinical factors are associated with physicians’ prescribing patterns for statins. The data are from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey for the period 1992 through 2004. The three samples examined included more than...