The purpose of Chapter 3 is to convince the reader that the Continental dollar was a zero-interest bearer bond and not a fiat currency—thereby overturning 230 years of scholarly interpretation; to show that the public and leading Americans knew and acted on this fact, and to illustrate the...

In a recent article, Sabia, Burkhauser, and Hansen report very large negative employment effects of the 2004-2006 increase in the NY state minimum wage on young, less- educated workers. I re-examine their estimates using data from the full CPS, rather than the smaller MORG files they use. I find...

In 1918 the United States Treasury delegated to the War Finance Corporation, a newly-created off-budget federal agency, the task of buying Liberty and later victory bonds in an effort to stabilize prices. Bayesian vector autoregression analysis of the bond purchase indicate that the WFC purchase...

The British North American colonies were the first western economies to rely on legislative-issued fiat paper monies as their principal internal media of exchange. This system arose piecemeal. It was monetary experimentation on a grand scale. In the absence of banks and treasuries that exchanged...

Current failures in the healthcare industry emphasize the need for a more fundamental understanding of how these contracts incentivize doctors. To aid this understanding, we treat the established physician-client-employer relationship as a multiple principal agent problem. We use a laboratory...

One in five Zambian children lives with an HIV/AIDS-infected adult. We estimate the effect that the availability of adult antiretroviral therapy (ART) has on the health of such children. Using a triple difference specification, we find that adult access to ART resulted in increased...

The most desirable Kenyan secondary schools are elite government schools that admit the best students from across the country. We exploit the random variation generated by the centralized school admissions process in a regression discontinuity design to obtain causal estimates of the effects of...

Medicare for seniors has been evolving for half a century and has performed very satisfactorily. Extending Medicare to cover everyone regardless of age would have several advantages. It would provide automatic coverage and portability for everyone regardless of employment, health status, income,...

Most developed countries have tried to restrain digital piracy by strength- ening laws against copyright infringement. In 2009, France implemented the Hadopi law. Under this law individuals receive a warning the first two times they are detected illegally sharing content through peer to peer...

This study investigates the effects of changes in various determinants of labor supply on the dramatic changes from the older (the 1950s and earlier) cohorts to the younger (the 1960s and later) cohorts in life-cycle labor supply behavior, and ultimately provides a model-based quantitative...