This paper investigates the Becker-Woessmann (2009) argument that Protestants were more prosperous in nineteenth-century Prussia because they were more literate, a version of the Weber thesis, and shows that it cannot be sustained. The econometric analysis on which Becker and Woessman based their argument is fundamentally flawed, because their instrumental variable does not satisfy the exclusio...

This paper treats taxation in kind (IKT) as an example of price regulation, emphasizing IKT-avoidance behavior, and its interactions with the other costs of price controls. This emphasis fundamentally changes efficiency conclusions, and adds new ones. IKTs do not in fact randomly sample suppliers, and the burdens of IKTs are not limited to the hidden tax paid by suppliers that actually transact...

The US government accumulated a large amount of debt from WWII. The government debt-to-GDP ratio in the US peaked at 108% in 1946. This ratio dropped dramatically in the following two decades, to 35% in 1966. Simultaneously, the US experienced a massive baby boom. This paper studies the relationship between these two phenomena in a modified version of the Barro-Becker model. In the model, the g...

Economists have long been interested in mechanisms that lead to truthful revelation of the relative values individuals place on different goods. In this paper we take one of the most popular of such mechanisms, and show that valuations obtained using the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) procedure depend on the distribution of prices presented to subjects when the mechanism is implemented. We show ...