A Victorian boy and girl excitedly welcoming their father home, while their mother stands and watches

How Government Helped Create the “Traditional” Family

Since the mid-nineteenth century, many labor regulations in the US have been crafted with the express purpose of strengthening the male-breadwinner family.
CNC machine drilling with coolant

Uneven Impacts: The Virtual Water Trade

The virtual water trade reveals significant disparities between water-rich states and their trade partners.
Rakhine farmers harvest in a rice paddy near Pa Rein village, Myauk Oo township on October 29, 2012 in Rakhine state, Myanmar.

The Challenges of Regulating Rice in Myanmar

The Myanmar government has regulated its agricultural and export industry through one specific crop: rice. What are the future prospects of the rice economy?
McDonald's Japan Swing Manager Miwa Suzuki presents a box of McChoco Potato on January 25, 2016 in Tokyo, Japan

Fast and Pluribus: Impacts of a Globalizing McDonald’s

The expansion of McDonald’s in the twentieth century brought the fast food chain to more than 100 countries. But how well did it integrate into its new home(s)?
Adam Smith

Adam Smith, Revolutionary?

By 1800, Smith—once considered a friend of the poor and an enemy of the privileges of the rich—was already being refashioned into a icon of conservatism.
An image of tigers and tropical leaves

Economic Grrrowth in the East: Asian Tiger Economies

Can the conditions that produced the fast-growing economies of the Four Tigers—Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan—be replicated?
Ladies at the tellers’windows of the Fifth Avenue Bank, New York 1900

A Bank of Her Own

The first US bank for women was opened by a fraudster in 1879. It took 40 years for a reputable women’s bank to be founded in Tennessee.
Flat vector illustration created from paper cut elements, hand drawn doodles and textures depicting mass surveillance and thin line between privacy and security concept.

Aspymmetrical Powers: Economic and Cyber Espionage

The lack of global governance over some acts of economic and cyber espionage is likely an intentional choice, one with varying benefits for state actors.
Scuba diver passing by a wreckage of a large sunken ship in the Red Sea.

Wreckonomics: “Finders Keepers” in Maritime Law

Finding valuable treasure underwater is more complicated than “finders keepers, losers weepers.” Competing maritime laws govern the recovered riches.
close up of $1 US dollar banknote

Why is the US Dollar So Strong?

Not only did post-World War II policy give the United States a managerial position in the world order, it gave it an outsize role in shaping the global economy.