This paper investigates the major drivers of governmental redistribution. We retest the Meltzer-Richard hypothesis and account for a plethora of political, institutional, and cultural forces that influence the scope of redistribution. Extended and harmonized data on effective redistribution...

This paper investigates the causes of the "vanishing effect of finance" detected in recent studies. The results highlight that the negative effect of the financial system on growth is mainly driven by advanced economies, whereas finance is still beneficial for income increases in developing...

We present a novel approach for measuring democracy, which enables a very detailed and sensitive index. This method is based on Support Vector Machines, a mathematical algorithm for pattern recognition. Our implementation evaluates 188 countries in the period between 1981 and 2011. The Support...

Evidence from a novel measure of democracy (SVMDI) based on Support Vector Machines highlights a robust positive relationship between democracy and economic growth. We argue that the ambiguity in recent studies can be traced back to the neglect of the information in the equation in levels and...

This paper investigates the effects of government spending on key macroeconomic variables in Germany. It contributes to the ongoing debate on how to properly identify exogenous fiscal shocks in the data and on whether or not the government should intervene in the business cycle. Following Ramey...

The diversion of development aid to the recipient’s military may be one explanation why aid is often found to be ineffective in promoting economic growth and development. Previous studies have not derived the causal effects of development aid on military expenditure. Using a new instrumental...