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...

In our previous paper “Can Trust Explain Social Capital Effect on Property Rights and Growth?” (Hall & Ahmad, 2013) we show that generalized trust data by the World Value Survey (WVS) are unable to yield sufficiently robust results in panel estimation due to missing observations problem. In...

In recent years the issues of energy consumption and economic development have become the concern of many parties, particularly policy makers. The empirical outcomes of previous studies examining the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth have been inconclusive and...

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...