This paper explores a wide range of cross-country determinants of life satisfaction exploiting a database of 90,000 observations in 70 countries. We distinguish four groups of aggregate variables as potential determinants of satisfaction: political, economic, institutional, and human development...

This paper examines how political ideology influenced economic freedom across the Canadian provinces. We analyze the data set of economic freedom indicators compiled by the Fraser Institute in 10 Canadian provinces over the 1981–2005 period and introduce two different indices of political...

This paper investigates the effects of inflows of foreign aid on the debt repayment behaviour of developing countries. The paper first delineates the overall incentives to committing to timely repayment in a war of attrition-type model. A set of panel estimates including 93 developing countries...

Social and cultural determinants of economic institutions and outcomes have come to the forefront of economic research. We introduce religiosity, measured as the share for which religion is important in daily life, to explain institutional quality in the form of property rights and the rule of...

This article connects two strands of the literature on social trust by directly estimating the effects of trust on growth through a set of potential transmission mechanisms. It does so by modeling the process using a 3SLS estimator on a sample of 85 countries for which a full data set is...

In the paper, we argue that trust is the missing link relating education, institutions, and economic development. We argue that increased trust both increases education and improves legal and bureaucratic institutions, which in turn spurs economic development. We substantiate this intuition with...

Conventional arguments suggest that republics ought to grow faster than monarchies and experience lower transitional costs following reforms. We employ a panel of 27 countries observed from 1820 to 2000 to estimate these differences. Results show no significant growth differences between the two...

Social and cultural determinants of economic institutions and outcomes have come to the forefront of economic research. We introduce religiosity, measured as the share for which religion is important in daily life, to explain institutional quality in the form of property rights and the rule of...

While previous research documents a negative relationship between government size and economic growth, suggesting an economic cost of big government, a given government size generally affects growth differently in different countries. As a possible explanation of this differential effect, we...