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What Do States Do? Politics and Economic History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2015

Philip T. Hoffman
Philip T. Hoffman*
Affiliation:
Rea A. and Lela G. Axline Professor of Business Economics and Professor of History, California Institute of Technology, 1200 East California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125. E-mail: pth@hss.caltech.edu.
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Abstract

Although politics has a huge effect on economic outcomes, we still know too little about what public goods states furnish or what determines the laws, regulations, and policies that states adopt. Worse yet, we do not really understand how states arise in the first place and how they gain the ability to tax. There are numerous unanswered questions here that economic historians can profitably work on, and their research will be particularly valuable if they model the politics, gather data on taxation and spending by local and central governments, and pay serious attention to the historical details and to political behavior that may not involve optimization.

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Articles
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The Journal of Economic History , Volume 75 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 303 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2015 

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Footnotes

The author would like to thank the editors, Jonathan Chapman, Tracy Dennison, Rod Kiewiet, Morgan Kousser, Ed McCaffery, Kate Norberg, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal for suggestions and criticisms. The author also benefitted from the advice generously given by the late Ross Thomson. Research for this project was supported by NSF grant SES-1227237.

References

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