Stephen Haber is the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also the A.A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor in the School of Humanities and Science and director of the Social Science History Institute at Stanford University.

Haber is also a senior fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, senior fellow of the Center for International Development, and Research Economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

His research focuses on the relationship between political organization and economic growth. Most of this research has focused on Latin America, particularly Mexico and Brazil.

New Book

The Politics of Property Rights:  Political Instability, Credible Commitments, and Economic Growth in Mexico, 1876-1929.  Series on Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

This book addresses a puzzle in political economy: why is it that political instability does not necessarily translate into economic stagnation or collapse? In order to address this puzzle, it advances a theory about property rights systems in many less developed countries. In this theory, governments do not have to enforce property rights as a public good. Instead, they may enforce property rights selectively (as a private good), and share the resulting rents with the group of asset holders who are integrated into the government. Focusing on Mexico, this book explains how the property rights system was constructed during the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship (1876–1911) and then explores how this property rights system either survived, or was reconstructed. The result is an analytic economic history of Mexico under both stability and instability, and a generalizable framework about the interaction of political and economic institutions.

See book page at Cambridge University Press
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