British Master and Servant law made employee contract breach a criminal offense until 1875. We develop a contracting model generating equilibrium contract breach and prosecutions, then exploit exogenous changes in output prices to examine the effects of labor demand shocks on prosecutions....

We estimate the impact of coups and top-secret coup authorizations on asset prices of partially nationalized multinational companies that stood to benefit from US-backed coups. Stock returns of highly exposed firms reacted to coup authorizations classified as top-secret. The average cumulative...

We estimate the impact of coups and top-secret coup authorizations on asset prices of partially nationalized multinational companies that stood to benefit from US-backed coups. Stock returns of highly exposed firms reacted to coup authorizations classified as top-secret. The average cumulative...

Do empirical estimates in economics reflect the political orientation of economists? We show that policy-relevant parameters are correlated with economist partisanship as predicted from the text of published academic papers. Specifically, we predict observed political behavior of a subset of...

Recent research indicates that labor market power has contributed to wage inequality and economic stagnation. Although the antitrust laws prohibit firms from restricting competition in labor markets like in product markets, the government does little to address the labor market problem and...

In this paper we revisit the relationship between democracy, redistribution, and inequality. We first explain the theoretical reasons why democracy is expected to increase redistribution and reduce inequality, and why this expectation may fail to be realized when democracy is captured by the...

We provide new estimates of the separations elasticity, a proximate determinant of the labor supply facing a firm with respect to hourly wage, using matched Oregon employer-employee data. Existing estimates using individual wage variation may be biased by mismeasured wages and use of wage...