Democratic polities appear to produce more stable policy than do autocracies. In this paper, we explore a potential source of the policy stability observed in democracies: special-interest groups. We find that interest groups are associated with greater stability in some measures of policy and...

We investigate the relationship between interest group activity and investment by analyzing an unbalanced panel of observations on 126 countries over three time periods. We find that the number of interest groups in a nation is negatively related to investment, consistent with a sclerotic effect...

We investigate whether the impact of institutions depends not just on their current state, but also on how they came to be. In particular, we hypothesize that while economic freedom that emerges spontaneously may be growth promoting, economic freedom that emerges as a result of costly lobbying...

According to World Bank policy, countries remain eligible to borrow from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development until they are able to sustain long-term development without further recourse to Bank financing. Graduation from the Bank is not an automatic consequence of reaching...

This paper explores empirically the relation between special-interest groups and economic growth. Our analysis exploits new data on the number of groups observed across countries and time, in order to mitigate the identification problems associated with earlier studies. Also in contrast to...

Market-oriented economic policies have been strongly linked to faster rates of economic growth. Foreign aid is often provided in part to encourage market-oriented reforms. We analyse the impact of aid on market-liberalizing policy reform, correcting for its potential endogeneity. Results...

Foreign aid has often been intended by donors to entice recipient nations into policy and institutional reforms favorable to private sector economic development. In this study, we investigate the relationship between aid and changes to economic freedom in recipient nations over the 1990-2000...