Do Economic, Institutional, or Political Variables Explain Economic Growth

Institutional Spillovers and Economic Growth

Do economic differences or institutions explain variance in the economic vote among countries

Despite all the methodological problems in defining the proper variables and methods to estimate it, an association between economic perceptions and vote choice or vote outcomes in the expected direction seems to be a regular feature of voting behavior. Nonetheless, there is important instability among elections and countries that tends to be attributed to methodological flaws or to contextual ...

Economic Growth and Political Survival

Using data for 162 countries for the period 1962-2006, this paper examines the importance of the national economic growth rate for the ability of a national leader to retain his or her position. To address the potential endogeneity of economic growth, I use commodity prices, export partner incomes, precipitation, and temperature to instrument for a country’s growth rate. The results indicate th...

Economic Growth under Political Accountability

We examine the impact of political and criminal accountability on economic growth. Governments seek to maximize their own consumption by extracting rents that are costly to growth. When citizens are able to depose politicians through elections, governments are tightly controlled. The rents politicians are able to extract increase in the length of their term. The effect of the threshold of crimi...

The Institutional Environment for Economic Growth

This article forges an explicit link between an objective measure of political constraints and variation in cross-national growth rates. It derives a new measure of political constraints from a simple spatial model of political interaction that incorporates information on the number of independent branches of government with veto power and the distribution of preferences across and within those...