What Do States Do? Politics and Economic History
文章指出政治对经济影响巨大，但我们对国家提供公共品、制定法律政策以及国家起源和征税能力了解不足，呼吁经济史学家通过建模、收集税收支出数据并关注历史细节来研究这些问题。
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.