In this paper, I shall defend two main claims. First, Friedman’s famous paper “On the methodology of positive economics” (“F53”) cannot be properly understood without taking into account influence three authors who are neither cited nor mentioned in paper: Max Weber, Frank Knight, and Karl Popper. trace both their substantive on F53 historical route by which took place. Once one has these ingre...

Article history: Received 6 February 2009 Received in revised form 10 August 2009 Accepted 9 September 2009 Available online 30 September 2009 JEL classification: D71 D72 F53 H11

Should polio be eradicated worldwide, countries must decide whether to continue to vaccinate with the live-attenuated vaccine, to continue to vaccinate with the alternative, killed vaccine, or to cease vaccinating. To reap a dividend from polio eradication, countries must choose the last option, but vaccination cessation entails interdependent risks as well as rewards. This article models the p...

What leads the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to intervene in one conflict, but remain inactive in another? This paper analyzes all 221 documented conflicts between 1945 and 2011, trying to unveil the characteristics associated with UN intervention. Including geographical aspects, we find that proximity to two the five permanent members of the UNSC has a significant and meaningful effec...

We model dynamic mechanisms for a global commons. Countries benefit from both consumption and aggregate conservation of an open access resource. A country’s relative value of consumption-to-conservation is privately observed and evolves stochastically. An optimal quota maximizes world welfare subject to being implementable by Perfect Bayesian equilibria. With complete information, the optimal q...

We analyze bargaining over international climate agreements in a setting with incomplete information about abatement costs. Incomplete information is known as one of the key reasons why negotiations may fail more generally, and why efficiency gains cannot be exploited. We ask whether unilateral commitment to high abatement reduces or increases the likelihood for an efficient negotiation outcome...

UN Interventions: The Role of Geography This paper argues that UN military interventions are geographically biased. For every 1,000 kilometers of distance from the three Western permanent UNSC members (France, UK, US), the probability of a UN military intervention decreases by 4 percent. We are able to rule out several alternative explanations for the distance finding, such as differences by co...

We analyze the influence of IMF and World Bank programs on political regime transitions. We develop an extended version of Acemoglu and Robinson’s [American Economic Review 91, 2001] model of political transitions to show how the anticipation of new loans from international financial institutions can trigger political transitions which would not otherwise have taken place. We test this unexplor...