Embedded Files
Publications
Publications
Peer-Reviewed
Peer-Reviewed
Hingl, Kurtis and Marcus Shera. (2025) "Ideas, institutions, and incompleteness." Journal of Institutional Economics, 21.
Geloso, Vincent, and Marcus Shera. "Presidents in deficit: are there historical rewards to deficits?." Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice 38.2 (2023): 290-305.
Benzecry, G. F., & Shera, M. (2023). The King’s Gambit: Rationalizing the fall of the Templars. Rationality and Society, 35(2), 167–190.
Shera, Marcus, and Kacey Reeves West. "Two worlds collide: A review essay of Humanomics: moral sentiments and the wealth of nations for the twenty-first century." The Review of Austrian Economics (2022): 1-17.
Shera, Marcus. "Who Now Remembers the Armenians: Mass Deportation as a Homogenization Technology in the Late Ottoman Empire." Cosmos+Taxis 9:1+2 (2021): 113-126.
Hall, Jacob, and Marcus Shera. "Classical liberals on ‘social justice’." Economic Affairs 40, no. 3 (2020): 467-483.
Book Reviews
Book Reviews
Shera, Marcus, Review of Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History, by Kyle Harper, The Independent Review 26, no. 4 Spring 2022.
Shera, Marcus, Review of Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism, by Glory Liu, The Independent Review, 27(4), Spring 2023. (Shared 277 times).
Shera, Marcus, Review of Power and Progress: Our 1000-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity, by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, The Independent Review, 28(3), Winter 2023
Current Projects and Drafts
Current Projects and Drafts
This paper explores the transition of Christianity after its legalization in the Roman Empire by combining the literature on the club model of religion (Iannaccone 1992) with the literature on religious legitimacy (Greif and Rubin 2023). Religious freedom allowed the Christian church to grow, but simultaneously created credible commitment problems that church leaders were not able to address. Bishops became enmeshed in the rent-seeking society of Roman imperial politics and they lost legitimacy as church leaders. The crisis of legitimacy threatened to break the church apart. Instead of endemic schisms, monastics, a group which took on extraordinary levels of sacrifice, developed in the midst of the larger church. Monastic sects are able to credibly signal their own independence of worldly affairs making them impartial legitimating agents for bishops who could not make such credible signals by the nature of their occupation. In return, bishops grant monks the ability to influence the world through the larger church. The resulting institution is “two-tiered” where an ascetic sect of monastics legitimates the episcopal leadership. The two-tiered model is able to benefit from the wealth and power of urban Rome while maintaining legitimacy. I explore this hypothesis with examples from the formative fourth to ninth centuries. The paper is currently under review and the most recent draft is available at SSRN. I discuss this paper and related work on the podcast Christ and Coffee.
We test the hypothesis that the sale of monastic lands following the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536-1540) cemented Protestantism in post-Reformation England. Drawing on a newly compiled dataset of 16th and 17th century MPs, we first establish that borough constituencies with a higher proportion of monastic lands had MPs who were more likely to support Protestantism during the reign of Mary I (r. 1553-1558). Furthermore, individual MPs with connections to ex-monastic land were more likely to support Protestantism and opposed Mary I. We go on to show that these attitudes persisted into the late 17th century. MPs representing boroughs with monastic lands were more likely to support the exclusion of the Catholic future James II from the throne in 1679-1681. A working version of the paper is currently hosted on SSRN.
Many social scientists discuss “ideas” by translating them into either preferences, constraints, or expectations. We argue that ideas also matter for focal point generation when institutions are incomplete. We claim institutions are incomplete when their constituent rules fail to induce behavioral beliefs about other people. At the incomplete margin, awkward moments occur, and ideas act as guides for coordination where institutions cannot. To understand which ideas guide better, social scientists will have to investigate an idea’s content in relation to its context. Our theory offers a way to look at endogenous institutional change due to incompleteness while also allowing the requisite room for ideas in explaining the patterned yet indeterminate trajectory of humanity. See a draft on SSRN here. The paper is forthcoming at the Journal of Institutional Economics.
AI generated Podcast Discussing the Paper (8:11)
I am also working on a paper hoping to illuminate the role of Islam in shifting economic activity into Northwestern Europe. More coming soon.
My Paper Map
My Paper Map
The above map maps out all my past, present, and projected work. I have the disease in which I only like think book-sized ideas while I need to be thinking article sized ideas. This map is my attempt to scratch my itch while focusing on one paper at a time.
I have organized the papers in four rough columns (with some placed intentionally in between. I then draw arrows between them to denote a rough conceptual flow. They are then color-coded for levels of completion:
Green: Paper completed and published.
Yellow: A draft is completed and may be under submission.
Orange: The paper is currently under progress.
Red: The project is in early stages.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse