The paper presents empirical findings regarding the economic policy consequences of constitutional arrangements, in three different dimensions. First, the data are consistent with several theoretical predictions about the consequences of electoral rules and forms of government for fiscal policy...

In this note, we revisit an earlier, highly influential paper on Financial Dependence and Growth by Rajan and Zingales (1998), by re-examining their assumptions, and the robustness of their results to alternative theories and interpretations. We first show that they may be implicitly testing...

We consider a tractable model of heterogeneous production units that features endogenous entry and productivity investment to assess the quantitative impact of policy distortions on aggregate output and establishment size. Relative to the standard factor misallocation framework, policy...

The home-market effect, first hypothesized by Linder (1961) and later formalized by Krugman (1980), is the idea that countries with larger demand for some products at home tend to have larger sales of the same products abroad. In this paper, we develop a simple test of the home-market effect...

We use the forward-looking information from the US and global capital markets to estimate the economic impact of global warming, specifically, long-run temperature shifts. We find that global warming carries a positive risk premium that increases with the level of temperature and that has almost...

In this paper we derive a new measure of openness--trade potential index--that quantifies potential gains from trade as a simple function of data. Using a standard multicountry trade model, we measure openness by a country's potential welfare gain from moving to a world with frictionless trade....

We study the distribution of economic activity, as proxied by lights at night, across 250,000 grid cells of average area 560 square kilometers. We first document that nearly half of the variation can be explained by a parsimonious set of physical geography attributes. A full set of country...

We survey the recent empirical literature on the effects of offshoring on wages, employment and displacement. We start with the measurement of offshoring, focusing on the use of imported inputs that could have been produced by the importing firm. We overview key theories related to offshoring...

If satisfaction with life (SWL) is used to measure individual wellbeing, the dispersion of its distribution offers a comprehensive measure of inequality that subsumes the many and various component forms of inequality in particular domains. The cross-country correlation between the level of SWL...

We construct a model of revolution and transition to democracy under individualistic and collectivist cultures. The main result is that, despite facing potentially larger collective action problems, countries with an individualistic culture are more likely to end up adopting democracy earlier...