Journal Articles

with Louis Rouanet in Public Choice, 2023

Monetary policy and institutions are far from exempt from political influences. In this paper, we analyze monetary institutions not as being run by either benevolent technocrats or a wealth maximizing Leviathan, but as being the outcome of competition between interest groups trying to capture wealth transfers. We argue that while interest groups gaining from specific monetary policies and institutions can easily identify themselves, losers often cannot. As a result, losers have a harder time fighting back and both the organization of money production and monetary policy are shaped by political competition between rentseekers. We use our framework to analyze modern developments in monetary policies and institutions, namely 1) the Fed’s reaction to the 2007 financial crisis, 2) the Fed’s reaction to the COVID crisis, 3) the establishment and development of the Euro.

with Chandler Reilly in Constitutional Political Economy, 2023

Under political competition, bureaucrats who wish to maintain their jobs and salaries must continue to stimulate demand for their agency's services in order to secure funding. This paper suggests that one way a bureau can do so is by creating avenues for private entities to collect rents through entrepreneurial action. The Federal Student Aid office in the U.S. Department of Education and their Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) can serve as an example. By getting students to fill out a FAFSA application, colleges obtain the detailed financial information of students and families. Colleges can then use this information to price discriminate. The bureau's derived benefits from this behavior are two-fold: (1) Private interests groups can lobby political sponsors to continue funding the agency. Using data obtained from lobbying reports filed with the federal government, we find that there is a positive relationship between lobbying expenditures and the implementation of regulations that enhance the value of the rents associated with the FAFSA. (2) The source of the rents can be used as a performance indicator to meet the demands of political sponsors. Drawing from the five-year strategic plans from the Department of Education and the Federal Student Aid office, we find that these bureaus can benefit from engaging in such behavior.

with Will Luther in The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 2020

In a recent article, Yermack (2015) argues that bitcoin is not money because it functions poorly as a medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. We offer a more conventional view. We maintain that the standard approach classifies an item as money if and only if it functions as a commonly-accepted medium of exchange. Then, we show that the demand for bitcoin is comparable to the demand for many government-issued monies. Finally, we argue that bitcoin is money—though perhaps only over a relatively small domain at present.

Working Papers

The Puritans faced a unique externality problem arising from their theology. They believed God would punish entire communities through crop failures, natural disasters, disease, attacks from indigenous tribes, and episodes of witchcraft for the sin of a single individual, making the sin of one the sin for all. To solve this, Puritans settled in compact towns, enabling the acute monitoring of one another’s behavior. To test this hypothesis, I construct an original dataset of 339 New England towns settled in the seventeenth century using eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books on town histories. I find that more religious towns were more compactly settled, while less religious towns were less compactly settled. This theory helps explain why centralized land demarcating institutions, which aided the Puritans in constructing compact settlement layouts, were often present in New England but absent in other American colonies.

The Economics of New England Witchcraft

The study of witch trials in 17th-century colonial New England has spurred various explanations, involving factors like disease, poisoning, weather, and the competitive religious landscape. In this paper, I argue witchcraft accusations were used as a means to redistribute property. The majority of those accused of witchcraft were women who lacked sons or brothers, individuals who would have been in line to inherit land following the death of their husbands. Unable to work the land, these women found themselves exempt from tax obligations and sometimes trapped in a state of impoverishment, often reliant on community support. By making accusations of witchcraft against these vulnerable women, communities could transfer their land to individuals capable of actively cultivating it, thereby improving the fiscal conditions of the town.

On the Origins of Measures

Carl Menger advocates for state enforcement of uniform weights and measures. We take an alternative view that standards of measurement will be adopted when the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs. We outline three possibilities of convergence or non-convergence to uniform standards between two places, and provide empirical examples of each. Then, we explain what incentives the State has in legislating standards and enforcing uniformity, as well as outline the consequences and problems they face in doing so. Finally, we review the history of legislated standards in eight countries and outline their failure of standardization. We conclude that any attempt for legislated standardization is either inconsequential, makes de jure what is already de facto, or hinders trade by replacing relevant local measures with a market failed standard.