Mancur Olson has suggested that the rate of economic growth declines as stable politics grow older, a proposition he tested using data from the United States in the 1960s. The authors reexamine Olson's hypothesis, using a large panel data set covering the twentieth century in the United States....

We examine the importance of Roosevelt's 'relief, recovery, and reform' motives to the distribution of New Deal funds across over 3,000 U.S. counties, program by program. The major relief programs most closely followed Roosevelt's three R's. Other programs were tilted more in favor of areas with...

In 1841 and 1842, eight states and the Territory of Florida defaulted on their sovereign debts. Traditional histories of the default crisis have stressed the causal role of the depression that began with the Panic of 1837, unexpected revenue shortfalls from canal and bank investments as a result...

This article provides comments on the article titled ‘Institutions and Economic Development: Theory, Policy and History’ by Ha-Joon Chang.

The New Deal produced a fundamental change in the structure of American government. The national government came to play a much larger role in the financing of social welfare programmes, while administration of the programmes was largely located at the states. Both the purely national and the...