In 2005 Hurricane Katrina posed an unprecedented set of challenges to formal and informal systems of disaster response and recovery. Informed by the Virginia School of Political Economy, the contributors to this study critically examine the public policy environment that led to both successes...

The Millennium Challenge Account's (MCA) focus on results and creating incentives for developing countries to enact good policy continues to hold promise for a well-needed change in government-driven international development assistance. The continued success of the MCA will depend on the...

Since 2008, support for effective fiscal stimulus has been premised on the belief in the existence of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of what became popularly known as ― shovel-ready projects. These infrastructure construction and improvement projects would simultaneously lower...

The federal government widely promoted the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act(ARRA), more commonly called the “stimulus package,” as a means to help states balance theirbudgets for the 2010 fiscal year amid decreasing tax revenues. The ARRA allocated $140 billion to help states' budgets...

There is renewed interest in a significant economic stimulus package to build and improve public works infrastructure. The experience of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) suggests that marrying the goals of infrastructure provision and putting unemployed individuals back to...

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacted an extraordinarily high human toll throughout the country, imposing an almost unfathomable strain on its healthcare infrastructure and vast losses in terms of economic growth and employment. The failures of the federal government in its response to the pandemic...

This paper studies the effect of property rights regime on farm efficiency, using a high-quality representative sample from Ukraine's agricultural sector. At the farm level, I find that a fully delineated and secure system of property rights leads to large positive gains in efficiency. In...

Efficient constitutional change depends on ability of bargaining parties to overcome such inherent problems of political change as commitment and credibility (Galiani, Torrens, and Yanguas, 2014; Congleton, 2011; Boettke and Coyne, 2009). This paper studies how constitutional bargaining leads to a...