Successful constitutionalism is characterized by de jure Constitutional provisions de facto binding political agents. A growing literature seeks to quantify cross-country variation in Constitutional compliance and explore its determinants (e.g., Law & Versteeg 2013; Gutmann et al. 2022; Voigt 2021). We...

This paper presents microeconomic evidence on US pricing dynamics immediately pre- and post-establishment of the Bretton Woods monetary regime. We track prices of 49 goods (1172 observations) in the 1938 through 1951 Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogs. Over the full time period the average length...

We use Comparative Constitutions Project (CCP) data to explore whether Constitutions that follow revolutions are designed differently. We employ matching methods using 31 treatments (revolutionary Constitutions) and 162 control units (new Constitutional adoptions without a revolution). We find...

Conventional monetary theory suggests that a closed system banking regime may lead to in-concert overexpansions of circulation by its banks. However, Selgin (2001, 2010) argues that this is unlikely as long as there are enough banks to ensure (i) routine interbank settlement and (ii) no...

We use the sensitivity of bank holding company equity returns to market interest rates as an indicator of perceived maturity mismatch. Based on data from 1990 to 2009, there is only weak evidence that market participants perceived banks to be effectively short-funded. However, looking at 1990 to...

We use annual data on capital's share and relative factor prices from 35 US industries from 1960 to 2005 to test the induced innovation hypothesis. We derive, from a production function framework, testable implications for the effect of contemporaneous and lagged factor price ratios on capital's...

In this paper, we outline (i) why σ-convergence may not accompany β-convergence, (ii) discuss evidence of β-convergence in the United States, and (iii) use U.S. county-level data containing over 3,000 cross-sectional observations to demonstrate that σ-convergence cannot be detected at the...

This note outlines (i) why σ-convergence may not accompany β-convergence; (ii) cites evidence of β-convergence in the U.S.; (iii) demonstrates that σ-convergence does not hold across the U.S., or within most U.S. states; and (iv) demonstrates the robustness of this finding to increases in mean...

We use U.S. county data (3,058 observations) and 41 conditioning variables to study growth and convergence. Using OLS and 3SLS-IV we report on the full sample and metro, non-metro, and 5 regional samples: (1) OLS yields convergence rates around 2 percent; 3SLS yields 6–8 percent; (2)...