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We explore the role of language policy choices as a source of growth and development of nation states. First in a cross-country framework we document that choosing as official a language that is distant from the ones spoken by the local population is negatively correlated with the level of income per capita. This effect is economically meaningful and robust to a wide variety of controls such as...

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We explore the effect of transparency of fiscal institutions on the scale of government and gubernatorial popularity using a formal model of accountability. We construct an index of fiscal transparency for the American states from detailed budgetary information. With crosssection data for 1986-1995, we find that on average and controlling for other influential factors fiscal transparency increa...

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The rise to prominence of Wal-Mart and other big-box retailers has given new life to the debate about whether “buyer power” at intermediate links in a vertically related chain of industries is good or bad for consumers and hence whether it requires the attention of competition authorities. The term is rarely precisely defined, but as used by most commentators “buyer power” refers to the circums...

A new era of of human development is upon us. The rates of technological, economic, social and environmental change have dramatically increased since the 1950s; we live in a world that is characteristically different from the one all previous generations of humans experienced. On many fronts, humanity is presently navigating the unseen [23]. Despite a variety of undeniable achievements of our s...

THE CURRENT DISCUSSION of capital formation in the United States reflects a general belief that investment has been inadequate during the 1970s and that this shortfall explains a large part of the current economic difficulties. The productivity slowdown, in particular, is often blamed on the failure of investment to keep the capital stock growing as fast as the number of workers. Specific concl...