Despite a sizeable theoretical and empirical literature, no firm conclusions have been drawn regarding the impact of political democracy on economic growth. This paper challenges the consensus of an inconclusive relationship through a quantitative assessment of the democracy-growth literature....

In the Grossman and Helpman (1994) model of endogenous trade protection, sectoral lobbies try to influence an incumbent government that maximizes a weighted sum of political contributions and aggregate welfare. We empirically investigate this model using U.S. and Turkish data. Our specification...

The empirical evidence on the Kuznets hypothesis ranges from positive or negative support to insignificant relationships. This hypothesis is typically tried in most studies in domains different than the one conceived by Kuznets, which pertains to the industrialization-led urbanization (i.e.,...

We study cross-country differences in rural and urban educational attainment by using a data set for a diverse group of 56 countries. Utilizing human capital, labor market and migration theories, we identify national, rural and urban factors that are expected to influence rural and urban...

Using Turkish industry-level data from 1983 to 1990, we find that politically organized industries receive both higher protection and promotion than unorganized ones. Tariff rates are decreasing (increasing) in the import-penetration ratio and the absolute value of the import-demand-elasticity...