We explore the relationship between voting rights and taxation in medieval England and France. We hypothesize that voting was a wealth-enhancing institution formed by the ruler in order to facilitate profitable joint projects with subjects. We predict when voting rights and tax payments will be...

We treat information acquisition by potential investors in initial public offerings as endogenous. With endogenous information, the critical question is why underwriters would allow investors to spend resources acquiring superior information intended solely to effect a wealth transfer. We show...

These volumes gather together a selection of autobiographical essays written by significant economists whose work is generally recognized to be at the forefront of the discipline as we enter the twenty-first century. The essays are largely based on introductions to volumes in the Edward Elgar...

The standard neoclassical model of economics is incapable of explaining why one form of organisation arises over another. It is a model where transaction costs are implicitly assumed to not exist; however, transaction costs are here defined as the costs of strengthening a given distribution of...

Intellectual property rights (IPRs) have been identified as key drivers of economic performance in R&D based growth models, but their impact on development has not been fully explored in development accounting exercises. We introduce IPRs to the development accounting literature, using Two-Stage...

This paper provides a human capital theory-based explanation for the presence of a permanent component in earnings levels as well as individual heterogeneity in earnings slopes. We incorporate uncertainty about the future rental rates of human capital into a life-cycle human capital investment...

This paper presents a generalized autoregressive distributed lag (GADL) model for conducting regression estimations that involve mixed-frequency data. As an example, we show that daily asset market information - currency and equity market movements - can produce forecasts of quarterly commodity...