Combining insights from economics, political science, and history, Professors Alston and Ferrie show how the timing and extent of the growth of the American welfare state from the Civil War until the mid-1960s was influenced by the Southern agricultural elite. Before the mechanization of Southern agriculture, the rural landed interests had an economic incentive to keep labor cheap and dependent. They accomplished this through their disproportionate political power at the local, state, and national level, which enabled them to maintain a discriminatory legal environment and prevent federal...

Empirical Studies in Institutional Change is a collection of nine empirical studies by fourteen scholars. Dealing with issues ranging from the evolution of secure markets in seventeenth-century England to the origins of property rights in airport slots in modern America, the contributors analyze institutions and institutional change. To make the papers accessible to a wide audience, the editors have written an introduction to each study and added three theoretical essays to the volume, including Douglass North's Nobel Prize address, that reflect their collective views as to the present and...

Empirical Studies in Institutional Change is a collection of nine empirical studies by fourteen scholars. Dealing with issues ranging from the evolution of secure markets in seventeenth-century England to the origins of property rights in airport slots in modern America, the contributors analyze institutions and institutional change. To make the papers accessible to a wide audience, the editors have written an introduction to each study and added three theoretical essays to the volume, including Douglass North's Nobel Prize address, that reflect their collective views as to the present and...