Since 1776, American states have continually amended and revised their constitutions. States have experimented with a wide variety of suffrage, representation, legislative structures, judicial structures, corporate law, and public finance. The constitutions themselves are a record of fundamental institutional change in American history. It is a record that not only reflects changes in the way Americans think about their governments, but a record of the changing institutional constraints on the American economy. Despite its inherent interest, there is currently no readily accessible consistent historical series on the provisions of state constitutions. This research will fill that gap by constructing a consistent, time series of state constitutional provisions from 1776 to the present. Printed source materials are available from compilations of state constitutions. The product of this research will be a detailed description of constitutional provisions, and a computer accessible data base of constitutional restrictions made publicly available through a Web site at the University of Maryland, linked to public data bases at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. In addition, constitutional limitations on government debt will be investigated in detail. The simplest question is whether these debt restrictions actually work.. The fundamental focus of this research is to solve the problem of endogeneity between the level and structure of debt and the creation of constitutional restrictions on debt issue. The issue of endogeneity is central not only to understanding how constitutional restrictions, like a balanced budget amendment, may work. It is central to understanding the interaction of economic behavior and institutional change over time.
