Recent years have seen a significant focus in the literature on growth and development on the idea that legal and political institutions are the key determinant of economic development. The main finding of this paper is that the focus on the primacy of legal and political institutions may be...

Women's rights and economic development are highly correlated. Today, the discrepancy between the legal rights of women and men is much larger in developing compared to developed countries. Historically, even in countries that are now rich women had few rights before economic development took...

In this paper, we propose a new approach to represent a country's outward orientation. Prior work mostly uses indicators of aggregate trade intensity, trade policy or trade restrictiveness. Our approach offers a broader perspective as it measures a country's level of integration not only by its...

This paper describes the correlations between inequality and the growth rates in cross-country data. Using non-parametric methods, we show that the growth rate is an inverted U-shaped function of net changes in inequality: Changes in inequality (in any direction) are associated with reduced...

We exploit differences in the mortality rates faced by European colonialists to estimate the effect of institutions on economic performance. Our argument is that Europeans adopted very different colonization policies in different colonies, with different associated institutions. The choice of...

This paper examines the robustness of explanatory variables in cross-country economic growth regressions. It employs a novel approach, Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (BACE), which constructs estimates as a weighted average of OLS estimates for every possible combination of included...

We introduce an instrumental variables approach to estimate the importance of unmeasured quality growth for a set of 66 durable consumer goods. Our instrument is based on predicting which of these 66 goods will display rapid quality growth. Using pooled cross- relatively sections of households...

There is one central fact about the economic history of the twentieth century: above all, the century just past has been the century of increasing material wealth and economic productivity. No previous era and no previous economy has seen material wealth and productive potential grow at such a...