Drawing on previously unused objective institutional data, we provide evidence for the causal link between rent-seeking behavior and democracy in Uruguay, a country where both rent-seeking behavior and political shifts have varied widely in the last 80 years, but where ethnolinguistic...

This paper study the issue of institutional enforcement of regulations by focusing on labor-market policies and their potential link to economic performance. It test the different impacts of enforceable and non-enforceable labor regulations by proxying non-enforceable labor rigidity measures...

This paper presents evidence on the impact of labor regulations on income inequality using two recently published databases on labor institutions and outcomes (Rama and Artecona, 2002; Botero, Djankov, La Porta, López-de-Silanes and Shleifer, 2003) and different cross-section and panel data...

We provide evidence on the link between infrastructure development and the distribution of income for the period 1960-1995. To do this, we use several proxies such as roads, railways, telecommunications and energy measures. The approach is comprehensive as cross-country and panel methods are...