This essay examines the historiography of two episodes in history – the scattering of plots in the open fields in the Middle Ages and the transition to the factory system in the Industrial Revolution – to shed light on the uses of institutional economics in economic history. In both of these...

This paper examines the macroeconomic effects of asset price bubbles and crashes in an overlapping generations economy. The model highlights the effects of asset price fluctuations on labor supply decisions, and demonstrates how labor market adjustment can help propagate the effects of these...

We examine project selection decisions of …rms constrained in the number of projects they can handle at once. Taking on a project requires a commitment of uncertain duration, restricting the …rm from selecting another project in subsequent periods. Due to the capacity constraints and need for...

This essay discusses the use of economic models for understanding law. It begins by describing the nature of economic models in general, and then turns to the specific application of economic models to law. The discussion distinguishes between “economic analysis of law”— which concerns the...

We use the Johansen cointegration approach to assess the empirical validity of the purchasing power parity (PPP) between the UK and the Euro Area, which we represent by Germany, the largest of its members. We conduct the empirical analysis in the context of the global financial crisis that began...

The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures in criminal investigations. The Supreme Court has interpreted this to require that police obtain a warrant prior to search and that illegally seized evidence be excluded from trial. A consensus has developed in the law and...

Over the past decades Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has emerged as an important nonparametric method of evaluating performance of decision making units through benchmarking. Although developed primarily for measuring technical efficiency, DEA is now applied extensively for measuring scale...

A handful of economically distressed cities and counties are considering using their power of eminent domain to write down the principal of underwater mortgage loans. Analogous to the condemnation of tangible real estate for public use, the city would “take” intangible mortgage loans from...

This paper examines the demographic pattern of friendship links among youth and the impact of those patterns on own educational outcomes using the friendship network data in the Add Health. We develop and estimate a reduced form matching model to predict friendship link formation and identify...

This review essay discusses and appraises Douglas Allen’s The Institutional Revolution (2011) as a way of reflecting on the uses of the New Institutional Economics (NIE) in economic history. It praises and defends Allen’s method of asking “what economic problem were these institutions...