We analyze the effect of the inherited Mexican property institutions in California on the state’s early agricultural development, focusing on land demarcation and the implied water rights. In California large tracts of land, called ranchos, granted during Spanish and Mexican rule of California...

This paper combines the property rights approach of Barzel with models from renewable resource and evolutionary economics to examine the domestication of wild animals. Wild animals are governed by weak property rights to stocks and individuals while domesticated animals are governed by private...

We explore the long run impact of the Spanish missions on Native American outcomes in the early 20th century. Native communities who interacted with Spanish missionaries developed into enclaves which blended Catholicism with native culture. Some survived assaults on their property rights by...

The managerial quality hypothesis suggests managers/leaders' quality (e.g., experience) contributes to performance. However, this proposition assumes all types of experience contribute equally to all spectra of policies. This oversimplification may explain the inconsistency in the leaders'...

Do political hawks prioritize different policies than technocrats? We address this question by building on the task-specific human capital framework, implementation literature, and politicization theory. We argue that skills accumulated in politicized posts differ from those accrued in...