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Untangling the Quality of Governance from the Level of Income: Are Sub-Saharan African Countries Governed Well?

Gundlach, Erich; Hartmann, Susanne - Institut für Weltwirtschaft (IfW) - 2005

We consider whether Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries are mainly poor because they are governed worse than other countries, as suggested by recent studies on the supremacy of institutions. Our empirical results show that the supremacy of institutions does not hold. SSA countries appear to face...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010886842

Persistence in Infant Mortality: Evidence for the Indian States

Arulampalam, Wiji; Bhalotra, Sonia - Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) - 2006

This paper investigates the high correlation in infant mortality across siblings using microdata for each of the fifteen major states of India. The main finding is that, in thirteen of the fifteen states, there is evidence of a causal effect of a child death on the risk of death of the...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005233756

Sibling Death Clustering in India: State Dependence vs. Unobserved Heterogeneity

Arulampalam, Wiji; Bhalotra, Sonia - Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) - 2006

Data from a range of different environments indicate that the incidence of death is not randomly distributed across families but, rather, that there is a clustering of death amongst siblings. A natural explanation of this would be that there are (observed or unobserved) differences across...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005762075

The Primacy of Institutions Reconsidered: The Effects of Malaria Prevalence in the Empirics of Development

Gundlach, Erich - Institut für Weltwirtschaft (IfW) - 2004

I reconsider the primacy of institutions over geography as an explanatory factor of cross-country differences in economic performance, which has recently been postulated by Acemoglu et al. (2001) and others. My estimates show that the reported missing direct performance effects of a measure of...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005076113

The agricultural and the democratic transitions. Causality and the Roundup model

Gundlach, Erich; Paldam, Martin - Institut für Weltwirtschaft (IfW) - 2009

Long-run development (in income) causes a large fall in the share of agriculture commonly known as the agricultural transition. We confirm that this conventional wisdom is strongly supported by the data. Long-run development (in income) also causes a large increase in democracy known as the...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005042611

A Farewell to Critical Junctures: Sorting Out Long-run Causality of Income and Democracy

Gundlach, Erich; Paldam, Martin - Institut für Weltwirtschaft (IfW) - 2008

We consider the empirical relevance of two opposing hypotheses on the causality between income and democracy: The Democratic Transition claims that rising incomes cause a transi¬tion to democracy, whereas the Critical Junctures hypothesis denies this causal relation. Our empirical strategy is...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005700560

The Transition of Corruption: From Poverty to Honesty

Gundlach, Erich; Paldam, Martin - Institut für Weltwirtschaft (IfW) - 2008

Measures of corruption and income are highly correlated across countries. We use prehistoric measures of biogeography as instruments for modern income levels to identify an exogenous long-run income effect. We find that our corruption-free incomes explain the cross-country pattern of corruption...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005566180

Two Views on Institutions and Development: The Grand Transition vs. the Primacy of Institutions

Paldam, Martin; Gundlach, Erich - Institut für Weltwirtschaft (IfW) - 2007

The Grand Transition (GT) view claims that economic development is causal to institutional development, and that many institutional changes can be understood as transitions occurring at roughly the same level (zones) of development. The Primacy of Institutions (PoI) view claims that economic...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005566215

Climatic Conditions, Cultural Diversity, and Labor Productivity

Gundlach, Erich; Matus-Velasco, Ximena - Institut für Weltwirtschaft (IfW) - 2000

Countries with the highest labor productivity overwhelmingly lie in the world's temperate climatic zones far away from … correlated with labor productivity after other variables are taken into account. We find that climatic conditions do not have a … significant impact on labor productivity once we control for factor accumulation and cultural diversity within countries. Our …

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005818783