My guest is Peter Jaworski of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. He is the author, along with Jason Brennan, of Markets Without Limits.
Noel recently released a working paper titled “The Effects of Land Redistribution: Evidence from the French Revolution.” It is co-authored with Theresa Finley and Raphael Franck. The paper examines the consequences of the land auctions held by the Revolutionary government in France. The abstract reads as follows:
This study exploits the confiscation and auctioning off of Church property that occurred during the French Revolution to assess the role played by transaction costs in delaying the reallocation of property rights in the aftermath of fundamental institutional reform. French districts with a greater proportion of land redistributed during the Revolution experienced higher levels of agricultural productivity in 1841 and 1852 as well as more investment in irrigation and more efficient land use. We trace these increases in productivity to an increase in land inequality associated with the Revolutionary auction process. We also show how the benefits associated with the head-start given to districts with more Church land initially, and thus greater land redistribution by auction during the Revolution, dissipated over the course of the nineteenth century as other districts gradually overcame the transaction costs associated with reallocating the property rights associated with the feudal system.
My guest for this episode is Ekaterina Jardim of the University of Washington. Ekaterina is one of the authors of the new minimum wage study that has been making headlines recently, “Minimum Wage Increases, Wages, and Low-Wage Employment: Evidence from Seattle.” One reason this study is so interesting is that it was funded by the City of Seattle, which is something that governments aren’t obligated or expected to do when they enact major policy changes like these minimum wage hikes.
My guest today is Kevin Erdmann, he blogs about economics and finance at Idiosyncratic Whisk.
Kevin has written a ton about housing, as evidenced by the titles of his blog posts. A recent one is labeled Housing: Part 239. This series is part of a larger book project that Kevin is publically drafting on his blog.
We discuss the housing bubble of the 2000s and the post-2008 housing market. I took my first undergraduate economics class in 2008, just as the financial crisis was beginning, so there’s never been a time in my economics career when people weren’t talking about this. And yet, I still have so much to learn!
Kevin makes an interesting distinction between “open-access cities” and “closed-access cities.” Closed-access cities are places like San Francisco, New York, and San Jose that have restricted their housing supplies. Open-access cities are places like Houston and Phoenix with more elastic housing supplies. We talk about these factors and how they relate to the housing boom and bust, liquidity, and central bank policy.
The book looks at the financial situations of ordinary American families. It is centered around a detailed survey of 235 households where they recorded what they earned and what they spent at an extremely granular level. Continue reading The Financial Diaries with Jonathan Morduch→
In this episode, I have three guests on the show with me: Kewei Hou of Ohio State University, Chen Xue of the University of Cincinnati, and Lu Zhang of Ohio State University.
As stated in the paper, “state capacity describes the ability of a state to collect taxes, enforce law and order, and provide public goods.” That said, state capacity does not mean big government. A state may have the power to impose rules across its territory, but it doesn’t have to use that power in a tyrannical way. Another way of saying that is to say that having a high state capacity is compatible with Adam Smith’s desire for “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.” Continue reading State Capacity and the Rise of the Modern Nation State with Mark Koyama→
