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I have a new paper that is now online. It is published by the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization and is co-authored with my old friends (more than a decade-long friendship) Maripier Isabelle and Julien Gagnon. Link is here and abstract is here:

Wage gaps between various groups within economies are common and policy solutions to attenuate them can have different distributional effects within groups. We propose a model to think about how, when labour is relatively immobile but capital isn’t, an economy with initial wage gaps between different groups can transition toward greater equality. We apply this framework to the French-English linguistic wage gap in Quebec (Canada) between 1970 and 2000 by looking at birth cohorts from 1910 to 1970. Our findings are consistent with our model: the closing of the wage gap was caused by a change, during the 1940s in compulsory schooling which shocked the initial equilibrium and led to cohort-specific dynamics.

There is also an op-ed I wrote for the American Institute for Economic Research summarizing the importance of this paper.

I have a new working paper, co-authored with a family member, on the governance of commons (i.e., open-access resources) in situations of weak states/statelessness. The paper studies a strange monopoly on fishing in the Gaspesian peninsula of Quebec (Canada) during the 1820s-1840s. The paper is here on SSRN and the abstract is below:

The inefficiencies of common property fisheries are well-known to economists. To avoid over-exploitation, they propose multiple forms of government solutions like taxes, quotas and the enforcement of property rights regimes designed to avoid over-harvesting. However, can there be efficient arrangements under statelessness or in the presence of weak states? One such example is the Gaspesian Peninsula (in the Canadian province of Quebec) during the first half of the 19th century. There, a single firm (the Charles Robin Company) came to dominate the market and it was able to effectively to restrict entry. In this paper, we unveil that it was able to do so by reducing the prices of imported goods that it would give to local fishermen in exchange for a part of their catch. This had the effect of deterring fishermen to contract with other merchants as well as deterring other merchants from entering the market. It also had the effect of making the region, contrary to what historians depict, richer than most regions of Canada at the time. We take this as an example of the ability to deal with commons problems in the presence of weak states.

I have a new working paper with Ilia Murtazashvili (University of Pittsburgh) and Kelly Hyde (RAND Corporation) on the topic of how economically free liberal democracies are disadvantaged in dealing with contagious diseases but that they have a strong upper hand in terms of alleviating all other diseases and causes of deaths. On net, we argue that economic freedom and liberal democracy improve outcomes far more than they deteriorate them. Paper is available here at SSRN and the abstract is below:

We investigate the institutional foundations of public health. We argue that a key distinction in analysis of disease is between diseases of commerce (diseases associated with movement of people and with affluence) and diseases of poverty (primarily noncommunicable diseases that depend on wealth and income). We show that the mix of disease – the ratio of communicable diseases and those associated with longevity to diseases of poverty – increases in economically free countries. We argue that increasing burdens of diseases of commerce reflects the quality of institutions, as those diseases are better than living shorter, brutish lives where diseases of poverty claim many lives. This analysis also highlights an institutional trade-off: economically free institutions reduce certain types of disease while contributing to others.

My paper with Justin Callais on how economic freedom improves intergenerational income mobility (changes along the income ladder relative to parents) is now available online at the Southern Economic Journal. The abstract is below:

Numerous studies have found that income inequality reduces the chances of upward relative mobility (i.e., climbing up the income ladder). However, most of this work ignores the role played by institutional quality (namely, economic freedom) in determining mobility and increasing the individual’s set of choices. We fill this gap by empirically testing the direct and indirect (through economic growth) impacts of economic freedom on intergenerational income mobility. We find that economic freedom has both direct and indirect effects on intergenerational income mobility, while income inequality is a strong predictor of downward income mobility. When we incorporate findings about the purely mechanical relationship between inequality and intergeneration income mobility, we find that the legal system and property rights component of economic freedom matters more than inequality. These results suggest that good institutions can increase intergenerational income mobility.

I have a new working paper with my friend and mentee Casey Pender of Carleton University. In this short paper, we revisit the performance of the Canadian economy during the two World Wars. Casey and I stand on the shoulders of Robert Higgs here to perform our work. We owe him a lot. The abstract is below and the paper is here on SSRN:

This paper provides a series of nominal non-war output for Canada during WWI and WWII and a novel estimated price deflator to account for wartime price controls. We argue that our nominal series, deflated by our price estimates, provides a superior indicator of welfare and general economic well-being during wartime than more traditional measures of real output. When looking at our series, we find that it is 11% lower than traditional measures in 1918 and closer to 30% lower in 1945. We also corroborate our finding with domestic private investment in Canada, which we show follows similar trends of decline during wartime relative to trend. We argue that this provides evidence against the idea of wartime prosperity and, more specifically, against the notion of WWII ending the Great Depression in Canada.