Many years ago, Emmanuel Todd came up with a classification of family types and argued that the historically prevalent family types in a society have important consequences for its economic, political, and social development. Here, we evaluate Todd’s most important predictions empirically. Relying on a parsimonious model with exogenous covariates, Read more…
Constitutional democracy is in decline and many would-be autocrats try to transgress constitutional constraints. Here, we introduce the concept of militant constitutionalism, which suggests a number of constitutional rules that could make constitutions more resilient to attempts to undermine them. A first empirical evaluation, however, can link only few constitutional Read more…
We draw on David Hume’s essays on happiness to extend ideas about welfare, preferences, and the social role of behavioral welfare economists in Mario Rizzo’s and Glen Whitman’s (2020)Escaping Paternalism. Through literary dialogue, Hume illustrates that individuals have different perspectives on the good life. These perspectives cannot be resolved by Read more…
In this paper, we analyse Hayek’s views on endogenous preferences. Perhaps surprisingly in the light of his remarks that economists ought to take people’s preferences as given, there are several places in Hayek’s economics and political economy where preference endogeneity plays a significant role. We begin by documenting those cases, providing an Read more…
This work looks at the policies aimed at promoting female participation in local legislative bodies using a series of changes to electoral law in Poland. We use a difference-in-discontinuities design to examine the effect of an introduction of a female quota on female participation in local councils. We find that Read more…
This paper argues that the different symbolic meanings of goods give rise to three institutionally different market types. We start from the realization that consumption has symbolic meaning, which individuals use to communicate and construct their identity to their social networks. We argue that firm behavior (including size, pricing and Read more…
From Lenin to the present, Russo-Soviet interpretations of the works of John Maynard Keynes have provided a lens by which to understand Russian economic thought and policy. Examining the evolution of these interpretations, unfortunately, reveals that Keynesianism in Russia has helped convince economists and policy makers that market systems cannot Read more…
Can variances in institutional structures between markets and governments lead to morally divergent outcomes? We explore the behavior of early American whiskey distillers in the market and political spheres. In a market where it was difficult for consumers to detect hidden impurities in whiskey, and thus there was an opportunity Read more…