The attempt to explain rule variation using rational choice models faces serious problems. An important range of phenomena, such as cooperation, cartels, and more generally the rules which organize economic activity, may need to be approached on a case-by-case basis. This necessitates the...

The heuristics and bias program has generated a body of striking experimental results that all serious students of human behavior need to address. It has increased our receptivity to what can be learned from experimental methods. And it has introduced into our vocabulary the important concept of...

The key to the development of manufacturing in antebellum Massachusetts is to be found not in newly available technological or organizational blueprints in the manufacturing sector, not in changes in tariff policies, and not in demand shifts (although all of these many have contributed to some...

Virtually all sectors of the nineteenth-century American economy were less capital-intensive than their British counterparts. This resulted from persistently higher American interest/profit rates, due in turn to American land abundance. The paper adduces the evidence in support of these...

In several articles published in the 1990s, de Long and Summers argued that investment in producer durables had a high propensity to generate externalities in using industries, resulting in a systematic and substantial divergence between its social and private return. They maintained, moreover,...

This paper considers the productivity impact on the U.S. economy of the period of war mobilization and demobilization lasting from 1941 to 1948. Optimists have pointed to learning by doing in military production and spinoffs from military R and D as the basis for asserting a substantial positive...

At the time they occurred, the savings and loan insolvencies were considered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Contrary to what was then believed, and in sharp contrast with 2007-09, they in fact had little macroeconomic significance. S&L remediation cost between 2 and 3...