We analyze the link between financial development and income inequality for a broad unbalanced dataset of 138 developed and developing countries over the years 1960 to 2008. Using credit-to-GDP as measure of financial development, our results reject theoretical models predicting a negative...

In this paper, we traced the survival status of 94,401 small businesses in 17 European emerging markets from 2007–2017 and empirically examined the determinants of their survival, focusing on institutional quality and financial development. We found that institutional quality and the level of...

Brunnschweiler and Bulte (2008) provide cross-country evidence that the resource curse is a "red herring" once one corrects for endogeneity of resource exports and allows resource abundance affect growth. Their results show that resource exports are no longer significant while the value of...

Economic freedom and economic growth can be connected in most countries, but it is often necessary to specify those aspects of economic freedom that can foster economic growth. This paper examines the nexus between economic freedom and economic growth in the Least Developed Countries (LDCs)...

This paper attempts to reconcile the apparent contradiction between two strands of the literature on the effects of financial intermediation on economic activity. On the one hand, the empirical growth literature finds a positive effect of financial depth as measured by, for instance, private...

This paper discusses the recent literature on the role of the state in economic development. It concludes that government incentives to enact sound policies are key to economic success. It also discusses the evidence on what happens after episodes of economic and political liberalizations,...

While the short-term growth consequences of natural disasters are comparatively well studied, there is little knowledge how disasters affect long-run growth. Based on truly exogenous storm indicators, derived from a meteorological database, we show that the growth effects of tropical storms go...

The present paper analyzes situations in which groups compete for rents. A major result in the literature has been that there are both cases where larger groups have advantages and cases where they have disadvantages. The paper provides two intuitive criteria which for groups with homogenous...