This essay examines Hernando De Soto's work on property rights, which can be viewed as providing two separate testable hypotheses: 1) secure property rights are positively correlated with access to credit and capital formation, which leads to economic development, and 2) land titling programs...

Burnside and Dollar (2000) conclude aid promotes growth in the presence of sound policies. Easterly et al. (2004) overturn this result. We revisit this highly debated topic with updated data. Our results overturn Burnside and Dollar's original findings by simply using new data over the same...