This paper investigates the impact of media freedom on citizens' political knowledge and participation. I find that media freedom has a large, positive and statistically significant effect on individuals' political knowledge, political participation, and voter turnout. The more government...

This paper investigates the effect of state contract enforcement on international trade. I estimate a gravity model of bilateral trade using panel data that covers 157 countries over the last 50 years. I find that state enforcement increases trade between nations - but less impressively than its...

Can anarchy be efficient? This paper argues that for reasons of efficiency, rational, wealth-maximizing agents may actually choose statelessness over government in some cases. Where markets are sufficiently thin, or where government is prohibitively costly, anarchy is the efficient mode of...

Is it possible to trade with bandits? When government is absent the superior strength of some agents makes it cheaper for them to violently steal what they desire from weaker agents than to use trade to obtain what they want. Such was the case with middlemen who interacted with producers in late...

Institutionally dependent payoffs determine the direction of entrepreneurial alertness and efforts. In order to understand the plight of developing countries, it is critical to understand that it is not a lack of entrepreneurship that is the problem, but rather the institutional context...

Self-enforcing arrangements are crucial to the study of African political econmy. The weakness of formal governance in much of Africa makes understanding informal institutions of cooperation particularly important. I consider the application of self-enforcing arrangements, like those described...

In this paper I identify fractionalization as a consequence rather than solely a cause of poor institutions. I investigate how heterogeneous agents in precolonial Africa relied on social distance-reducing signals to make trade with one another possible. I then show how colonial institutions...

This paper investigates the effects of state-created homogeneity on the ability of socially distant individuals to trade. I show that where the state is absent, socially distant agents adopt the customs, practices and institutions of outsiders they desire to interact with. By creating a degree...

This paper argues that Mises's methodological position has been misunderstood by both friends and foes alike. On the one hand, Mises's critics wrongly characterize his position as rejecting empirical work. On the other hand, his defenders wrongly interpret his stance as rejecting empirical...

This paper provides a critical challenge to the Whig view of economic ideas, which holds that good ideas from the past are embodied in the common scientific wisdom. In contrast to this position, we contend that the market for ideas, while no doubt competitive in terms of scientific rivalry, is...