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AbstractThis article explores the relationship between country membership in major intergovernmental organisations and economic freedom. While it makes no claims to have found any broad theoretically bound, robust causal mechanism, baseline fixed effects models establish relationships amongst economic freedom and membership in the EU, NATO, WTO, UN, OECD, World Bank, and IMF. Though the results are not simple, the strongest findings are negative relationships with the UN, IMF, and WTO, and positive relationships with the World Bank and possibly the EU.

AbstractI use matched county pairs on either side of US state borders to investigate the causal effects of the Economic Freedom of North America index (EFNA) on local outcomes. This method is similar to Dubeet al. (2010). I construct a panel of county pairs running from 1981–2012 and four measures of outcomes, logged real incomes, logged real per capita incomes, employment, and logged real wages, employing single year and five year differences-in-differences. I find small, but precisely estimated, effects on incomes but mixed effects on wages and employment. All regressions show lowR2. This supports the hypothesis that state-level economic freedom improves capital income or that it attracts capital income across state borders.

Abstract
This paper considers how Bryan Caplan's concept of rational irrationality may manifest in various political institutional arrangements, building off the demand curve for irrationality. Mob democracy, anarchy, autocracy, and constitutionally constrained democracy are the governance structures addressed. While anarchy is strictly better than mob democracy, under certain conditions, democracy, anarchy, or constitutionally constrained democracy may yield the best outcomes depending on the circumstances.

Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter popularizes the "near-neoclassical" demand curve for irrationality. This article attempts to show that there is a demand for irrationality at prices higher than zero. This may change policy implications. Many instances of consumer behavior, such as paying a premium for locally produced and "fair trade" goods, the use of local currencies, and the failure to vaccinate children, are other instances of the means-ends irrationality that Caplan observes in political markets.

Nassim Taleb has risen in the past decade to become an authority on the intersection of finance, statistics, and epistemology, popularizing insights regarding fat tails and true uncertainty. Most recently, his 2012 book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder follows the ideas of the earlier publication The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), and its extensions are apparent. The Black Swan challenged readers to consider unpredictable events that fall outside the formal models of academics, especially economists. Antifragile shifts the emphasis to domains where black swans are asymmetric. Some domains of human experience offer unlimited upside but limited downside. Taleb encourages his readers to find ways to make their personal lives and the social and political worlds more antifragile. Antifragile might have furthered a strong intellectual tradition, but it is better thought of as an overwrought exercise in atavism. Adapted from the source document.

Following 2006's Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World is an intellectual journey perhaps no one besides Deirdre McCloskey is qualified to take us on. The grand mystery McCloskey challenges us with is what she calls the "factor of sixteen," the startling magnitude of per capita income growth since 1800 after millennia of stagnation. No "traditional" explanation of growth both stands up to historical examination and contains the power to explain the factor of sixteen.

This paper contributes to the literature on state capacity by developing a method that yields an index of state capacity with far more comprehensive data coverage across time and countries than has been possible previously. Unlike narrower measures of fiscal capacity or legal capacity, the index is more comprehensive, using data from the Varieties of Democracy dataset on fiscal capacity, a state's control over its territory, the rule of law, and the provision of public goods used to support markets. Like the previous literature, it demonstrates that the historical prevalence of warfare predicts state capacity. Several exercises are performed to demonstrate the validity of the index in measuring state capacity.

AbstractThis article applies previously estimated effects of immigration on housing values to urban counties in the United States. Our findings here also help estimate how much of the increase in the net capital share of income since 1970 as observed by Piketty () is caused by immigration. We find that in most urban counties in the United States, increased levels of immigration have had a modest but non‐negligible effect on the level of real estate prices and, per Rognlie (), likely capital share. These estimates provide hard numbers for the public debate over immigration policy in the United States, with implications elsewhere as well.

The resource curse, as manifested by an increased likelihood of conflict over rents, can be mitigated by institutions. Lei and Michaels find that discoveries of "giant" oil fields increase the likelihood of violent conflict, but they find no evidence that democratic institutions mitigate this risk. We test whether institutions mitigate the resource curse by reducing the risk of natural resource conflicts. Our results indicate that high quality economic institutions reduce the likelihood of territorial (separatist) conflicts following natural resource rent windfalls. Highly autocratic and highly democratic institutions also reduce the likelihood of territorial conflict after natural resource rent windfalls. (JEL Q34, O13, P48, D74)

AbstractThis paper applies a variation on differences‐in‐differences to the effects of economic freedom in matched bordering metropolitan statistical areas using the Metropolitan Economic Freedom Index. While a great deal of research has explored the relationship between economic freedom and economic performance, less has been done at the local level. We find that economic freedom has a positive effect on several measures of economic performance, but no effect on population.