This article offers a quantitative analysis of wealth inequality in the Ottoman Empire, employing data from probate inventories (terekes) of eighteenth-century Kastamonu, a town located in northern Anatolia. Extracting information on the wealth levels and personal characteristics of individuals,...

This paper empirically explores the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC)in multiple quantiles and examines the risk structure of the inflation process focusing on the asymmetric monetary policy. The estimation results support the canonical NKPC in upper quantiles while the hybrid version fits...

Although dominated by public sector banks, India already had a significant presence of private domestic banks and foreign banks. What the banking reforms have done is to create a more level playing field where banks of different ownership types compete within a new set of broad (and far more...

The Grossman-Hart-Moore (GHM) property rights model predicts the assignment of residual claims to the party with the largest effect on an asset’s value. While plausible, the model has proven relatively hard to test. In this paper, we develop a formal model based on GHM, and use it to analyze...

A fundamental question of economic and technological history is why some civilizations adopted new and important technologies and others did not. In this paper, we construct a simple political economy model which suggests that rulers may not accept a productivity-enhancing technology when it...

This paper examines the hypothesis that the strong reduction in the effect of school quality on housing prices from the inclusion of boundary fixed affects can be attributed to uncertainty associated with school assignment near attendance zone boundaries, rather than unobserved neighborhood...

This paper addresses two issues. First, we employ unit-root tests that allow for two endogenous breaks as suggested by Lumdaine and Papell (1997) and, more recently, Lee and Strazicich (2003) to investigate the integration properties of the returns on the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. The...

The shadow economy is an extensive phenomenon worldwide. It poses several questions, the consequences on fluctuations in economic activity being among the major ones. Based on official data, this paper establishes a set of cyclical properties of macroeconomic aggregates and studies how these...

The Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. New London (2005) authorized the use of eminent domain for economic redevelopment projects provided that there are sufficient spillover benefits to the public in the form of enhanced taxes and new jobs. This paper examines the economic basis for this...

Law and economics scholars argue that the common law evolves toward efficiency. Invisible hand theories suggest that the law is primarily driven by a selection process whereby inefficient laws are litigated more frequently than efficient laws, and hence are more likely to be overturned. But the...