Using World Bank estimates of intergenerational educational persistence and mobility for multiple across the development spectrum, this paper finds that economic freedom noticeably improves educational mobility. This is probably because economic freedom increases the returns to education in ways...

Lighthouses are the quintessential public goods and thus constitute a key illustration of market failure in need of government remedy. Considerable debates have been waged over whether optimal private provision was historically possible. However, little to no attention has been devoted to how...

While some view the informal economy as parasitic, others view it in a more positive light. We argue that the effect of the informal economy on development depends on both the size of the locale and the institutional environment. Good institutions facilitate productive activity and voluntary...

A growing literature seeks to identify the determinants of economic freedom. Within that literature, very few studies have focused on constitutional design. We study the entrenchment of constitutional provisions, i.e., the extent to which they are more difficult (costly) to change than...

This paper contributes to the literature that uses the Economic Freedom of North America (EFNA) index to evaluate relationships with various outcomes. Most of the literature estimates a linear relationship between economic freedom and those outcomes. However, using matching methods can be a...

Should procedural barriers to constitutional amendment be more onerous than those to the policy changes of ordinary politics? – i.e., should constitutions be entrenched? One criterion by which to evaluate these questions is economic performance. Using data on countries worldwide and...

What is self-governance, and under what sets of institutions is it possible? We explore this question from the perspective of informal (de facto) constitutionalism. The dominant approach, grounded in formal constitutionalism, overlooks crucial institutional features that determine whether...

The term “marketplace of ideas” is thoroughly misleading. This phrase is often used to suggest that bad ideas are “defeated” by better ideas in public discourse. In the field of economics, for example, it is commonly assumed that the mainstream, precisely because it is the mainstream,...

The Great Recession led to a large decline in economic activity throughout the entire United States with significant variation in its severity across regions. Our paper examines the role of economic freedom in explaining these differences at the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) level. We use...