The Kodila-Tedika & Bolito-Losembe (2014, ADR) finding on no evidence of causality flowing from State fragility to classical corruption or extreme corruption could have an important influence on academic and policy debates. Using updated data (1996-2010) from 53 African countries, we provide evidence of a positive (negative) nexus between political stability/no violence and corruption-control (...

Most studies that emphasize and encourage the shift towards a less regulated and financially open system rest on the premise of a prosperous growth prospect. Accordingly, interests have focused on growth models as a framework to understand and to analyze the effects of economic freedom. In this paper, we investigate the short-run characteristics of economic freedom. Using a stochastic general e...

Majority voting and social evaluation functions are the main alternatives proposed in the literature for aggregatingindividual preferences. Despite these being very different, this papershows that the ranking of income distributions, symmetric under the same transformation, by S-Gini consistent social evaluation functions and majority voting coincide if and only if the inequality index under co...

Using the POLITY IV and Freedom House indices, Rowley and Smith (2009) found that countries with Muslim majorities enjoy less freedom and are less democratic than countries in which Muslims are a minority. Because the POLITY IV and Freedom House indices have been criticized on several grounds, I reinvestigate Rowley and Smith ́s finding using the new Democracy-Dictatorship data from Cheibub et a...

This paper develops a theory of inequality and the social contract aiming to explain how countries with similar economic and political “fundamentals” can sustain such different systems of social insurance, fiscal redistribution, and education finance as those of the United States and Western Europe. With imperfect credit and insurance markets some redistributive policies can improve ex ante wel...

The flows of traded goods across countries are known to follow a gravity pattern: their volumes are greater between countries that are larger in size and closer to each other. We find a similar pattern in the flows of territories across countries between 1870 and 2008. During this period, countries experienced inflows and outflows of territories, mirroring the international flows of goods. We f...

We analyze how public debt evolves when successive policymakers have different policy goals and cannot make credible commitments about their future policies. We consider several cases to be able to quantify the effects of imperfect commitment, political disagreement and political turnover. Imperfect commitment drives the long-run level of debt to zero. With political disagreement debt is a size...

We show that reputational effects may explain differences in economic performances of dictatorial or authoritarian governments. A good reputation convinces citizens that the dictator will exert high effort in economic performance. With replacement, a dictator exerts high effort only if its foregone rent is not too large. Without replacement, the dictator succeeds in convincing the citizens of i...

This paper uses a large panel data set to examine the relation between elections and fiscal policy. We find evidence of political budget cycles in both developed and developing countries: government spending increases before elections while revenues fall, leading to a larger deficit in election years. We demonstrate that political budget cycles are much larger in developing countries than in de...

Using a millennium of data for 12 countries in the East and in the West this paper tests the extent to which the three most influential hypotheses on growth and development can shed light on why some economies developed earlier than others and which factors were fundamental for the Great Divergence. These hypotheses are the contracting institutions, property right institutions, and culture. It ...