Showing 1 - 7 of 7
Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, and Yared (2008) demonstrate that estimation of the standard adjustment model with country-fixed and time-fixed effects removes the statistical significance of income as a causal factor of democracy. We argue that their empirical approach must produce insignificant...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010263527
The paper considers the transformation of the political system as countries pass through the Grand Transition from a poor developing country to a wealthy developed country. In the process most countries change from an authoritarian to a democratic political system. This is shown by using the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010263528
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/10010265234
We use factor analysis to derive a robust measure of religiosity from items reported in five waves of the World Value Survey. Our measure of religiosity is negatively correlated with per capita income. Development apparently causes religiosity to fall to about half its pre-modern level. Most...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010265850
We consider the empirical relevance of two opposing hypotheses on the causality between income and democracy: The Democratic Transition hypothesis claims that rising incomes cause a transition to democracy, whereas the Critical Junctures hypothesis denies this causal relation. Our empirical...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010272978
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/10010273104
Measures of corruption and income are highly correlated across countries. We use prehistoric measures of biogeography as instruments for modern income levels. We find that our instrumented incomes explain the cross-country pattern of corruption just as well as do actual incomes. This result...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010273171