The Rule of One-Third guaranteed wives one-third of their husband's estate upon marital dissolution through death or divorce. We document the historical ubiquity of this legal construct and show that without a wife's residual claim on her husband's estate, children's outcomes are imperiled....

We thank three anonymous referees for thoughtful comments and suggestions which we found very constructive and helpful. We are particularly grateful to the editor, Al Klevorick, for his advice and painstaking guidance through the multiple revision process. We thank Robert Barsky, Susanto Basu,...

During Sudan's interim period from the end of civil war in January 2005 until South Sudan's independence in July 2011, foreign development agencies provided extensive support and billions of dollars in aid - for which institutional development and capacity building of the nascent Government of...

This paper investigates the effect of local immigration enforcement regimes on the migration decisions of the foreign-born. Specifically, the analysis uses individual-level American Community Survey data to examine the effect of recent 287(g) agreements, which allow state and local law...

Several theories have been offered to explain the recent declines in violent crime rates in the United States. We hypothesize that technological innovations, which improved information transmission and shortened the response time between an aggravated assault incident and treatment, reduced the...

This paper examines interconnections between law, politics and the quality of government in Africa. We investigate whether African democracies enjoy relatively better government quality compared to their counterparts with more autocratic inclinations. The empirical evidence is based on...

Party systems research has proceeded along two parallel lines of inquiry, one predominantly “qualitative” and the other “quantitative.” This article attempts to bridge this divide in two ways. First, by showing that qualitative information can be valuable in the construction of...

This paper uses a large panel of bilateral bank flow data to assess how institutions and politics affect international capital -bank in particular- flows. The following key findings emerge: 1) The empirical "gravity" model is the benchmark in explaining the volume of international banking...

This paper revisits the tragedy of the commons when agents have different capabilities in both production and encroachment activities, and can allocate their time between them. Under fairly general assumptions on production and encroachment technologies, an individual's expected income is convex...