This paper compares more direct measures of the institutional environment with both the instability proxies used by Barro (1991) and the Gastil indices, by comparing their effects both on growth and private investment. The results provide substantial support for the position that the...

This paper makes two contributions to the literature. First, it introduces a new, easily accessed and objective measure of the enforceability of contracts and the security of property rights. Second, it uses this measure to provide additional and more direct evidence about the importance of...

This paper examines the causal relationship between financial development and economic growth in Egypt during the period 1960-2001 within a trivariate VAR setting. We employ four different measures of financial development and apply Granger causality tests using the cointegration and vector...

This paper examines the causal relationship between financial development and economic growth in five Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries for different periods ranging from 1960 to 2004, within a trivariate vector autoregressive (VAR) framework. We employ four different measures of...

We reconstruct a dataset used by Persson and Tabellini (AER, 1994) to test the robustness of their finding that inequality reduces income growth, but only in democracies. We find that their result is highly sensitive to the use of data sources on both democracy and inequality. When we substitute...