Global value chain (GVC) participation has been identified as one of the means by which developing countries can attain inclusive growth yet little attention has been paid to it in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Motivated by the dearth of studies on SSA, we investigate the effect of GVC participation...

Joseph A. Schumpeter is one of the most famous economists of the 20th century and the ’patron saint’ of the finance and growth literature. We have discovered that the prevailing literature has, however, misinterpreted Schumpeter, which leads to puzzling empirical results and difficulties in...

Labor market regulation is a controversial area of public policy in both developed and developing countries. Mainstream economic analysis traditionally portrays legal interventions providing for minimum wages, unemployment insurance and (often only a modicum of) employment protection as...

This paper shows that Tabellini's recent claim to have provided evidence that culture has a causal effect on economic development is unjustified. Tabellini's claim is based on an instrumental variables analysis in which two instruments are used to identify the supposed causal effect. One of...

The article leads to explain the impact of micro credit activity on human development. This issue presents an indispensable social asset to society. It reflects the employment status and quality of life. Econometric modeling helps us' to estimate the impact of micro credit on the standard of...

This paper exploits the variation in the timing of electoral law enforcement across nine Latin American countries to consistently examine the contribution of de jure and de facto political institutions to long-run development. The set of novel measures of electoral law enforcement is constructed...

This paper shows that Tabellini’s recent claim to have provided evidence that culture has a causal effect on economic development is unjustified. Tabellini’s claim is based on an instrumental variables analysis in which two instruments are used to identify the supposed causal effect. One of...

We present a new aggregation method - called SVM algorithm - and use this technique to produce novel measures of democracy (186 countries, 1960-2014). The method takes its name from a machine learning technique for pattern recognition and has three notable features: it makes functional...

This paper investigates the Becker-Woessmann (2009) argument that Protestants were more prosperous in nineteenth-century Prussia because they were more literate, a version of the Weber thesis, and shows that it cannot be sustained. The econometric analysis on which Becker and Woessman based...

I reconsider the primacy of institutions over geography as an explanatory factor of cross-country differences in economic performance, which has recently been postulated by Acemoglu et al. (2001) and others. My estimates show that the reported missing direct performance effects of a measure of...