The "great divergence" between Europe and the rest of the world occurred relatively recently. What enabled Europe, with all its laggards, to dominate the previously successful Eastern economies? This article emphasizes one important mechanism, highlighting the contrast between the European...

We develop a political economy model of sovereign debt that shows that income inequality leads to popular pressures on the government to use foreign debt to finance a redistribution of income at the expense of productive public investment. Recognizing this fact, international lenders impose...

We develop a political economy model of sovereign debt that shows that income inequality leads to popular pressures on the government to use foreign debt to finance a redistribution of income at the expense of productive public investment. Recognizing this fact, international lenders impose...

Many developing countries display remarkably high degrees of urban concentration, incommensurate with their levels of urbanization. The cost of excessively high levels of urban concentration can be very high in terms of overpopulation, congestion, and productivity growth. One strand in the...

Many developing economies are characterized by the dominance of a super metropolis. Taking historical Rome as the archetype of a city that centralizes political power to extract resources from the rest of the country, we develop two models of rent-seeking and expropriation which illustrate...