Religious divisions have long played a primary role in major conflicts throughout much of the world. Intergroup contact may increase trust between members of different religions. However, evidence on how inter-religious contact affects individuals' behavior towards one another is scarce. We...

Decades of investment decisions by central planners left communist societies with structures of production ill-prepared for competitive markets. Their vulnerability to liberalization, however, varied across space. Similar to the effects identified in the "China shock" literature, we hypothesize...

Much of the literature on patriotic sentiment in post-Soviet Russia leans on the results of public opinion surveys administered to Russian citizens. Absent a comparison group, such evidence, while helpful, can leave one adrift in trying to assess the significance of any particular polling...

This short article contributes to the Elgar Encyclopedia of Public Choice by summarizing the literature on the measurement of democracy. I proceed in two step. In the first part, I describe the classical approach for producing a measure of democracy and sketch an alternative approach. The second...

The paper starts with a view on public debt as a current and historical phenomenon. Then follows a short review of traditional explanations for the debt-state link. Three different approaches are distinguished, the first one building on institutional economics, the second one on applications of...

I’ve been writing about inflation for the better part of three months. It’s been exhausting. Most of my time has been spent debunking misconceptions promoted by mainstream economists. Fortunately, I’m ready to move on. What’s interesting about inflation is not the fact that prices rise....

We stand now at a turning point, wherein many roads sprawl out in front of us. With unprecedented access to information, the atlas seems to lie within our hands. But, at this crossroads, the popularizers of these many paths shout over one another to persuade new travelers, only to find that most...

Rapid technological change is often touted as a fundamental reality of capitalist societies. It is also presented as concrete evidence for the supposed progressive improvement of material well-being that characterises the capitalist system of social order. Since its emergence in the mid-20th...

Can the oil industry afford to clean up its mess? If by ‘mess’ we mean fossil-fuel-induced climate change, the answer is almost certainly ‘no’. But what if we look at a more limited cleanup scenario, restricted to the remediation of conventional oil and gas wells? Even then, it seems...

Après avoir défini différentes manières de calculer les distances entre les langues (méthode lexico-statistique, distances de Levenshtein, distances basées sur les arbres linguistiques ou encore distances phonétiques) et entre groupes de population, ce chapitre propose d'explorer comment...